Greenwich Naval College July 22, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London , add a commentThe Naval College Buildings at Greenwich
Viewed from Island Gardens at the tip of the Isle of Dogs across the river, because the DLR train service to Cutty Sark was suffering from delays on Sunday. The buildings were designed by Sir Christopher Wren just as he was limbering up to build an even bigger dome on top of St Paul’s Cathederal.
The aim of our trip was to enjoy an evening cruise but that was cancelled too, never mind. Another surprise was to see a giant ferris wheel next to where the Cutty Sark is meant to be.
Eurostar Paris trains from London getting busier July 21, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Paris Breaks , 1 comment so farI used to wonder what would happen after the Eurostar Paris trains were diverted from the interim Waterloo International station to the new St Pancras and now we are beginning to see the answer. International commuters in their thousands are switching from short haul flights between the two capitals to the fast St Pancras service by Eurostar. Paris has of course been moved 20 minutes closer to London since November last year, but it’s also the higher price of aviation fuel which has driven people away from the troubled terminals at London’s airports. So the situation now on an early weekday morning is that the waiting areas at St Pancras station are chock a block with people heading to Paris in time for a full day’s worth of meetings.
The Times business observes:
The airline industry has been crushed by the price of kerosene and deserted by passengers fed up with delays. After decades of disappointment, false dawns and virtually bankrupt Channel Tunnels, we have finally arrived at the age of the train and the evidence is in the crowd at St Pancras.
Traffic growth on Eurostar increased by 21 per cent in the first quarter of 2008 compared with the same period in 2007, with growth in the second quarter supposedly at similar rates. So the combination of fuel prices, airport delays and the shaving of 20 minutes off the London-Paris Eurostar journey time has boosted income by 25 per cent according to The Times.
When the channel tunnel was first mooted in the 1980s, a lot of people were expecting a road tunnel they could drive through. More said they would be afraid to go into a long tunnel under the sea, and would stick with the ferries, though it was feared the ferry companies might be driven out of business by the new tunnel. The roll on roll off ferries from Dover are still running, providing a cheaper option for slightly less urgent freight transport, but it’s the short hop airline routes between the south of England and the business cities in the North of France, Belgium and Holland which were always the competiton for the Eurostar express trains.
So the problem now is that the Waterloo terminal for Eurostar is closed while the new St Pancras Station is getting near to capacity already. So why didn’t they build it bigger or else plan to keep both running, giving travellers a choice between South and North London connection points for the Eurostar Paris trains?
I suppose the shortage of waiting areas at St Pancras might be eased when the Stratford International station comes into service, taking some of the strain for passengers heading for Paris breaks originating from East London and the City. I’ve heard it has already been built but can’t be opened because it’s in the middle of an Olympic Games 2012 building site.
If you’ve never been on a Eurostar Paris trip, here’s a longish video from youtube which gives a nice impression of what the journey is like.
Google Suggests a pre-emptive text search July 16, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Long Tail, video , 3commentsA short video to show how Google Suggest works and to imagine how this might change people’s behaviours if it gets deployed as the default search mode.
If I’m right and Google are seriously considering releasing this live then how big a change do you think it will mean and what are the implications for search engine results overall if Google Suggest slips into widespread use?
Wordpress as a Wiki July 15, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wordpress, Wiki , 10commentsWordpress version 2.6 is now out on release and the video below shows some detail of the new revision control which gives authors some of the functionality of a Wiki on top of the most popular blogging platform.
From now on, a history of post versions is retained in the database together with the date stamp and author details, so that different versions can be compared and if necessary reverted. That’s one of the main essential features of a wiki taken care of. With self registration and a granular level of administrative privilege already built in, it should be possible to set up a Wordpress installation which is fairly open for public editing, just like a wiki. All that’s left to be added in order to give mediawiki a run for its money is a nice and simple way to link across between posts, by reviving the concept of CamelCase WikiText perhaps. Then there’s section editing, edit summaries and recent changes and the whole method of navigating from the post as published to the wysiwyg editor in the dashboard especially if this involves login along the way.
But the news is big because version 2.6 has just taken an enormous leap forward towards becoming something even more powerful. The idea of WordPress as a Wiki content management system is firmly on the agenda.
Can you learn how to write lyrics? July 8, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : creativity, theory, Music , 1 comment so farLearn how to write lyrics?
The story goes like this: I was reading Friendfeed and came across a link to a site about How to write Lyrics and thought to myself “Well that’s a bit presumptuous isn’t it?” On visiting the site I found advice which seemed to recommend ‘tuning in to the music of the spheres’. Bah humbug said the little critic sitting on my shoulder, so I left a terse drive-by comment and moved on thinking no more of it. Then the original author read it and called me out, so good for him. We’ve had a good chat since during which I realised that I’ve never written down my own story about getting to grips with the songwriting process, so here it is as promised.
My problem with writing lyrics
I picked up a guitar and learned to play when I was about fourteen, mostly devising my own versions of favourite songs by ear. Songs by people like Loudon Wainwright who is possibly the greatest lyric writer of all time, are 
usually pretty simple in terms of the chord structure and I’d always loved to sing. Very soon I wanted to write my own songs because that’s what any musical artist seemed to need to do in those days, and it’s still the case today, if not more so. I found that the music came pretty easily, just out of experimenting with the sound of new chords and progressions, jamming with myself for hours on end so to speak. The lyrics, on the other hand, were problematic. I kept a notebook with two ends. At one end I wrote down rough drafts and odd verses, full of crossings out and rewrites. Then when I thought I had a finished song together with music I’d copy it to the pristine end and feel pleased with myself for having completed one. The trouble happened within a few days or weeks when I’d try to play the new song again and decide that it’s rubbish. Often the crossings out and rewrites had made it worse, or the original material was based on a really bad concept in the first place. Part of the problem was that I hadn’t fully understood that song lyrics are not poetry, and many of the most sucessful songs look pretty awful if you try just reading them as cold print. And teenagers are always very self conscious, so amongst all of this, just a handful of songs emerged which stood the test of time. “Hold on Below” is one of those from my early teenage period, together with Puddles and The Show Carries On.
The theory of idealism
Because I didn’t understand why sometimes, rarely, I was able to write lyrics that I was happy with, while at most other times nothing good would come out, I began to entertain the theory that the inspiration was coming from somewhere “out there” rather than from within. That fits with a philosophy of idealism which is common enough in our society, and prevalent amongst artists but which I now view as particularly unhelpful. I could go for months and even years at a time with writing a single song, waiting for the right conditions in which the muse would arrive. I even wrote one about that very idea which contained the line “I’m just the man who held the pen that wrote it down” which is very similar to the concept at the How to write Lyrics site where it says “I don’t write music, music writes through me”.
My new approach to songwriting
If you have ever read published authors advising hopeful writers on how to write a novel, the advice usually comes in the form “Sit down at a desk and start writing. Then continue writing every day for at least eight hours until you have written the first draft”. They have to treat it as any other job, otherwise it will never get done. So I decided a few years ago to try the same approach to songwriting. I knew I had a song which I wanted to write, a ballad about a journey I had made. I planned myself a day to write it, and decided that I would spend the day on a river boat cruising up and down the Thames, making good use of the all-day ticket.
I took with me paper and pencils, and maps to remind me of the journey. There was a convenient table on the boat so I installed myself there and got eveything out, knowing I had all day to get the song lyrics written. I love being on boats so this had been a great idea, and within a couple of hours I had about eight or nine verses written so I could afford to take an enjoyable lunch break. That song remains unchanged (well, apart from the pronunciation of Ugijar) as “Winter in Andalucia” for which I get requests from time to time, and it’s a nice one to play if I ever feel like quietly fingerpicking and can remember all the lyrics.
Intentionally writing song lyrics
So this was nothing short of a revelation. If I set out deliberately to write a lyric, I could do it!
Songwriting trip
A few years later, I was badly let down by a companion with whom I’d planned a holiday. I decided to go anyway, as the flight and car were all booked up, but instead of trying to have a holiday by myself I would treat it as work and do lots of writing. I said I would write a CD, which meant writing enough songs so that maybe ten or twelve of them would be worth keeping. Eight would do it at a pinch, and I had a week, so one song a day seemed reasonable.
I started writing the day before, and made good use of the time on the plane. After a day or two on the road I didn’t restrict myself to writing sat at a desk. In fact I often started composing a first verse or so while walking.
Creative Walking
Zoom back a few years and during a sparse phase for songwriting there was one song which emerged from out of a camping trip. Filling two large water containers then tramping back downhill, the rhythm of my gait started me off humming and then I shut myself away for half an hour and wrote some lyrics to the new tune. That’s Mondura Dam.
So during my deliberate CD writing trip I fell back on the creative walking technique once or twice, and then made sure I memorised the verse or two composed in my head, so I could write them down and elaborate after I got back to the hotel. Incidentally I don’t think I could do that with a companion.
How to Write Twenty Three Lyrics
By the end of that trip I had no less than twenty three new lyrics which I’m still using as base material. Gernika, Cormorants and The Wreckers Prayer all came from then, and there are a few more which may also represent some of my best work. So I’m definitely convinced now on the question of how to write lyrics, that the deliberate method is the best one for me. The same philosophy probably stands for other forms of writing and creativity as well, like this blog post for example, which I planned yesterday and then got out of bed this morning with the deliberate intention of getting it written and published.
- Links
- Andy Roberts Music page at DARnet
- Free Download Andy Roberts songs from last.fm
- How to Write Lyrics lens at squidoo
- How to write lyrics lesson two
Questions about Wikiversity July 2, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, Wiki , add a commentThis post continues the discussion about distributed action research and wikiversity from DARnet interview part two and DARnet-interview-part 1 with Cormac Lawler
Cormac wrote:
About changing of groups’ structure over time, I think my own domain (Wikiversity) is showing an increasingly strong tension along the lines of making Wikiversity a place of ‘blue-sky’ or experimental learning versus an alignment to known pedagogical forms. See http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki
/Wikiversity_talk:Learning resources#the_wiki_way.3F and below for some discursive material on this topic. It’s perhaps not an example of a change of guard as such (and the debate within Wikiversity’s development is not new), but I’m starting to see the tension as a pretty fundamental one for Wikiversity.
Reading that discussion again on the Wikiversity page, it strikes me
that both sides of the tension referred to are in fact agreed upon
working within the same framework. The dispute, if I’m not mistaken is
over the nature and quality of the learning resources which are to be
accumulated in the Wikiversity. Neither side appears to be questioning
the basic model of education based on learning from supplied content.
The references to ‘experimental’ forms seem to remain within
experimental forms of content provision, without questioning that
preconception. Despite the claim that
“Wikiversity has adopted a “learn by doing” model for education”
the doing appears to consist entirely of editing pages to create more
resources.
Do you think a bias towards conventional content based learning is
built in to the wiki way?
How might other learning processes be facilitated through Wikiversity?
I’m thinking of the newer emerging learning models such as
connectivism, which would place the emphasis on the network between
people and the community above content. This might require additional
tools to the document based wiki, but needn’t be entirely separate.
I’m not predicting the splitting into groups, as you say, but I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Indeed, I see the role of my own action research to explicitly throw into relief the sometimes conflicting viewpoints that people bring to the project - in order to reveal something deeper about what we’re doing, and how we can move forward with a simultaneously more critical and expansive mindset.
Thanks for initiating this
London Bloggers presentations June 26, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : london bloggers , 4commentsLondon Bloggers
This month’s London Bloggers evening meetup organised by Andy Bargery returned to the Coach and Horses with a slightly more formal evening than the usual social event, having four presentations for us to consider.
Comment Tag
Presented by Xavier Damman. After a good roundup of general strategies for encouraging comment on blogs, the Wordpress plugin CommentTag was presented. It’s for when you get loads of comments on one post (like the 178 comments on this Jodie Prenger in Oliver post) and the plugin generates a tag cloud which aids filtering and navigation of the comments. This could also be useful if the trend for video comments takes off.
The audience grappled with this concept, at first imagining all sorts of artificial intelligence for auto generating the tags but in fact the tags have to be typed in by the commenters and are then stored and retrieved at runtime from a third party database. Unless you are running one of the big media blogs it’s unlikely you would bother with it and I couldn’t help wondering if this comment tagging idea is a solution that’s looking for a problem. But let’s see.
Optimising Blogspot
A mysterious person (possibly Improbulus) who blogs anonymously shared some self discovered tips for optimising blogs for search engines as well as for human readers, based on experience in an undisclosed topic using google’s blogger software. It was refreshing to hear linking out encouraged, but the idea of deliberately mixing up UK and US spellings with synonyms was pretty weird.
WordCamp UK
Tony Scott gave us the low down on the first WordCamp UK which is a semi-unconference for the whole range of WordPress users from novice bloggers to PHP developers taking place on 19-20th July 2008 in Birmingham. Tony claimed that the conference is being organised using “open source methods” to which I would ask “where is the source?” 
M3
M3 is a small startup company trying to launch a product which at first hearing sounded similar to buzzspotr, but instead of doing a mashup of twitter and google maps it’s a walled garden proprietary system. On the plus side, they say the site is designed for mobile devices right from the start.
Beers
I was too late for the Free Alcohol but enjoyed a glass or two of Old Rosie with Tony, Tim and Epicurienne .
Next month’s London Bloggers Summer Social is on Tuesday July 29th
What is the Universal Edit Button? June 19, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Wiki , add a commentToday the global Wiki community launches a new tool which aims to make editable web pages as recognisable as those with RSS feeds. Called the Universal Edit Button it will appear in bowsers address bars as a green icon with a pencil like this:
Does the Universal Web Editing Button matter?
According to the The the universaleditbutton.org wiki, the Universal Web Editing Button (UWEB) is going to allow www surfers to recognize more easily than at present when a visited site is open for editing by the public. So that’s handy for those of us who are already inclined to contribute to see the opportunity, and might also serve as an invitation to those who don’t edit wikis as a general rule, not having yet come across the idea of collaborative document building through public participation. As the editable web becomes better known and even commonplace, the UWEB button may become regarded as a badge of distinction and then serve as an incentive for organisations and site developers to add publicly-editable pages to their external sites, in order to be able to display the UWEB proudly.
To see the universal edit button in a browser, users will currently need to download a Firefox extension, (installation notes). In time, it is hoped that all browsers will include this feature as they have done for RSS feeds, and the original vision for an editable web will be one step closer.
DARnet interview part two. June 15, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : ultraversity, distributed research, edublog, Action Research, Wiki , add a commentIn part one of the DARnet interview, Cormac Lawler asked me, Andy Roberts, about distributed action research, cycles, groups and background.
This second episode continues the interview, again with Cormac’s questions in red, followed by my reply.
* So, which online university did you attend? What were you studying?
The online university was a research project itself at the time,
called “Ultraversity” and run by the now defunct “Ultralab” centre
attached to Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford, Essex. I
registered an interest before it started up and was admitted to the
first cohort, who came to think of ourselves as guinea pigs for the
revolutionary new online degree with zero face to face element and no
content. That may sound a bit mad but you have to understand that the
BA Learning, Technology, Research degree is workplace based, so mainly
for adults in employment. The subject for the research and therefore
content for the degree then derives from individual circumstances. So
the Ultraversity research project was launched with high hopes of
becoming an independent force for transforming UK higher education,
but has ended up being absorbed into the Anglia Ruskin education
department, minus some of the ideals and as a shadow of the original
ambition. I hear that some of the original ex-staff are building
something elsewhere.
* Did your research there feed directly into what you do now, or are you referring to a grounding in research methods/practice?
In a way, yes I did manage to make my studies relevant to future work.
I set up the distributedresearch domain and the DAR wiki as a major part of it, for example, and one third of the subject (L,T,R) was a grounding in action research theory, methods and practice.
* Are you still affiliated with any formal study programme?
I really don’t have a taste for undertaking any post graduate studies,
but as one of the alumni, I still have access to the online community and I’m
a member of a small informal group where we try to help and sometimes
mentor individuals from subsequent cohorts.
* I’m still not sure if I understand the domain of your research. Is it fair to say that it’s all based on your own practice, and not that of a group?
At its best, action research is always participatory and I do work
with groups in terms of facilitating online communities, with a
particularl interest in communities of practice. But since I became
a full time work-at-home internet entrepreneur last year, I’ve needed
to concentrate at first on activities such as pro-blogging, hence the
need for a spot of first-person action research to get my own act in
order. My domain and primary interest is still very much the social web.
* What is/are that/those practice(s)? What is the relationship between your community/ies in/to your work?
Sometimes it’s a very indirect relationship. For example, one of my oldest communities of practice is the UK cider makers group “ukcider” which I convened and facilitated since 2001. There is no business model, and it’s sometime difficult to find a way to pay the web hosting fees, but I suppose I’ve learned stuff through the processes and development there which I then manage apply in other domains.
About changing of groups’ structure over time, I think my own domain
(Wikiversity) is showing an increasingly strong tension along the lines of
making Wikiversity a place of ‘blue-sky’ or experimental learning versus an
alignment to known pedagogical forms. See Wikiversity_talk:Learning_resources#the_wiki_way and below for some discursive material on this topic.
Education is a political battlefield, and it often looks to me as if
the war was lost ages ago. The fundamental question is to ask “who is
this institution meant to serve?” which requires an understanding of
the nature of the state. Often the people who work in education start
out with idealistic notions of what the work is for, and imagine they
are helping to shape people’s minds in an empowering way, but end up
carrying out orders in the interests of the powers that be, who long
ago gave up believing that an educated general workforce is a
desirable thing as far as advanced capitalism is concerned. They need
people educated enough to be able to work the machines of an
information economy, and to be consumers in a digital age, but only a
small number are required to be independent, creative, critical
thinkers and problem solvers. So the prevailing model for education
is always content based, with the students viewed as empty vessels to
be filled. Even the UK Open University, which was born out of the pro
labour reforms in post war Britain, has been based largely on a pushed
content model, now with added forums.
I’d be very interested to hear to what extent parts of Wikiversity have managed to break away from the idea of the “course”, the expert, and the content. If you have people transfering across from the Wikipedia culture then it’s going to cause problems, but you could always fork a minority project for the more revolutionary work if it seems to be getting defeated.
It’s perhaps not an example of a change of guard as such (and the debate within Wikiversity’s development is not new), but I’m starting to see the tension as a pretty fundamental one for Wikiversity. I’m not predicting the splitting into groups, as you say, but I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Indeed, I see the role of my own action research to explicitly throw into relief the sometimes conflicting viewpoints that people bring to the project - in order to reveal something deeper about what we’re doing, and how we can move forward with a simultaneously more critical and expansive mindset.
You’ve used a phrase from Wikimedia’s mission - “the sum of human
knowledge”. Do you think such an entity exists? How do you see it? How do
you have access to it? How do you participate in it?
I’ll rephrase that to “The full extent of human knowledge” because of
course knowledge doesn’t really have a sum, does it!
Ten years ago you could find out just about anything by tracking down
the right bulletin board or newsgroup, asking a carefully explained
question, and coming back later to view responses or ask a
supplementary. Within a few days you’d have the best the net could
come up with. Now we have Google search, with all its limitations and
gaming, and google scholar for some of the hidden internet, but you
can still usually track down the author of particularly pertinent
idea, find out their online presence with a bit of luck and chance a
speculative email. So the backbone infrastructure of having
connections between devices all over the world will always find a way
to serve people who know a little bit about how to seek and connect,
no matter what infrastructure is built on top of it all, and I’m still
pretty optimistic about that regardless of whether we lose some
battles along the way such as net neutrality or the health of the
regime in charge of Wikipedia.
End of part two of the DARnet interview. To be continued.
The Homemaker Plate - for Object Wiki June 11, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, Wiki , add a commentI photographed a mass produced ceramic dinner plate in my possession which is from the the design classic series “The Homemaker” for the Object Wiki, a project from the Science Museum, which aims to collate information from the public on some of the objects from their collections.
I like the quirky design for being bold enough to champion household objects on a dish, for the seemingly impossible shape of one or two of the designs depicted, and above all for the cheerful optimism of 1960’s modernism. I didn’t even know it was designed by Enid Seeney before reading the Object Wiki entry, but this led me to explore the background to the plate on the C 20 th site which is also home to theatre memorabilia.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
