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Staying Connected February 28, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment

Staying Connected. Echoes of Conflict: stories of how communities cope

Just published, a book about conflict resolution based on research undertaken amongst diverse communities in my own London Borough of Newham. According to Richard McKeever of community-links.org:

The interviews in the report give an authentic snapshot of the ways that different communities living in Newham are responding to the conflicts they encounter The research concluded that conflicts in communities are inevitable, and can be productive as societies adjust to new circumstances. For conflicts to have a positive outcome they need to be handled appropriately. Different cultures have different ways of resolving conflicts

The aim in collecting the stories was to better understand the conflict resolution processes which exist within Newham’s diverse communities. The pace of change for people migrating to the UK has been rapid. They have had to adjust quickly from one set of social values to another, particularly regarding family norms; so much so that a wide gap between generations has been created.

Community Links - Our Work - Staying Connected

connectedcoverweb_jpg_media_public.jpeg

( not currently available from amazon.co.uk )

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EXHIBITION DATE March 8th February 24, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment

exhibition
The date for the start of my online exhibition is now set at

Wednesday March 8th 2006

so please try to make some time either on the opening day or ensuing week, to take a look at the material and commentary which I’ll be presenting. It will be all about these early stages of investigating Distributed Action Research, with examples, opinions and my own learning journey. I hope you’ll find it interesting or useful and I really do need as much critical feedback as possible for this one, so be prepared to leave comments or join conversations if you can.

There’s going to be a little poll you can take as well, where you get to plot your own attitudes and opinions onto a series of four dichotomies about online communities, so that sounds like a bit of fun, doesn’t it.

You might also want to help out by joining in the Wiki Barn Raising Party which starts two days into the week, on Friday March 10th ( bring your own bottle, music etc )

The exhibition URL will be here at
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2006/02/22/degree-exhibition/ ( password protection will be removed on the 8th )

and the Barn Raising coordination page will be on the Wiki at
http://distributedresearch.net/wiki/index.php/Barn_raising That’s open now so you can help to formulate plans for gathering and communication if you like.


( photo from my futuroscope set at Flickr.com )

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Google Pages - Page of blogs February 24, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , 1 comment so far

An experiment with Google Pages, which was released today.

It doesn’t like my older version of Firefox but works OK with Seamonkey. I’m not going to upgrade to the latest Firefox because I don’t like the predictive text box entry bug which requires a forced quit to cure it every time.

Anyway, here’s my minimalist geogooglecity page which links to a few instant photo blogs.

aroberts - Andy Roberts’ page of blogs

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Asynchronous dar February 23, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research , add a comment

Recently added to Darwiki

Linda Hartley describes the difficulty of identifying clear research cycles sometimes, when conducting DAR asynchronously.

“A clear sequence is hard to see, I know. I think this is partly because of the nature of the research in the aysnchronous environment. It’s hard to tease out the clear cycles. The diagram is a fudge in a way. The real story of the research is much more complex with lots of small cycles. Data comes in over time and people who were asked to comment on the first cycle of actions might not reply until part way through the second cycle. Some comments come in and point out such obvious points that action needs to be taken at once.”

Andy Roberts adds: That’s a good observation about one of the features of conducting distributed research asynchronously, as is often the case. I suppose it would have to count mainly as one of the disadvantages, but not too difficult to cope with once you get used to it.

On the plus side, the fact that conversations and online artifacts persist for much longer than synchronous episodes, increases the chances for larger potential audiences to be reached, and also means that the quality of engagement might be higher if people take advantage of the ability to make more considered responses.

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Degree Exhibition February 22, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : exhibition , comments closed

Welcome to

DAR - distributed action research - the exhibition

( skip introduction and enter )

Hi and welcome to my online exhibition. For these two weeks I am an exhibitionist, so I’ve been out and about trying to find people and railroad them along here to listen to what I have to say, and I am very grateful indeed that you have arrived. Thankyou.

This is what you are going to find further inside:
A few pages of narrative writing, diagrams, ideas, optional podcasts to listen to, a self analysis poll for you to consider, links to hidden corners of my online presence, and a glossary all designed to take up no more than 15-20 minutes or so of your time, unless you wish to expore further of course.

Since you have managed to find your way here, I’m going to assume that you can get back here again. Please do so whenever you feel the need the re-orientate yourself and especially at the end when you’ve had enough, so that you can leave me some useful critical feedback in the comments section below this entry page. That’s one of the most important parts for me, so please don’t forget to write something. You might like to take notes as you move around and then paste them into a comment, or open up two browser windows - one for browsing the exhibition and one for composing your comment. I’m sure you know best how you like to operate.

So when you’re ready now, this is the way in;

ENTER

schedule of opening and closing times

Admission is open to all and everybody. Bloggers may deep link as well as pointing to the entry page.

“Bring all the people from Victoria Station. Everyone go home
and tell your relations” - Tommy!

what else

I REALLY DO NEED your critical feedback about my research and findings, so please Leave a reply below, or if you prefer send it in an email to me at

aroberts@gmail.com

Thanks.

*update*

Thanks to all who left comments both here and elsewhere. This page is now closed for further comments, but please see a continuation of the discussion in “thesis as a wiki, the validation and defense module”

Aston Villa? February 21, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , 2comments

According to webstats, the single most frequent referrer to this domain in February so far has been http://astonvilla.blogfootball.com. Of course it could well be spoofed (referral spam) but the site does offer members blogs and aggregators so I’m not sure what to make of it. If by any chance you just happen to be reading this via the villa site would you be so kind as to let me know please?

And also, why are you still wearing the more highly esteeemed 78492305_942ca18a67_m.jpg West Ham United’s colours?

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Pictures of new species discovered in New Guinea February 18, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , comments closed

Papua New Guinea has more than once provided true life events of a “Lost World” nature, because of the geography of the region. The shape of the mountain ranges has left behind completely isolated areas, some quite vast, where the local biodiversity develops or stagnates totally unaffected and unknown by the outside world.

Pictures of new species discovered in New Guinea

The discoveries were made under CI’s Rapid Assessment Program (RAP) which deploys expert scientists to poorly understood regions in order to quickly assess the biological diversity of an area. The conservation organization makes RAP results immediately available to local and international decision makers to help support conservation action and biodiversity protection.

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Researching the searchable blogosphere February 14, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , comments closed

A distributed research experiment is being conducted to look at the performance of search engines and blogs by including the made up word brrreeeport in lots of blogs. You can check for progress.

Some questions arising:

Who gains from this experiment?
Does anybody lose?
So what?

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Sharing Wi-Fi February 10, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment

One piece of the jigsaw begins to slot into place and with it, plans to work from a British Waterways continuous cruising licence grow ever more feasible.

Venture for Sharing Wi-Fi Draws Big-Name Backers - New York Times

A telecommunications executive said on Sunday that he had received $21.7 million for what he called “a global network of shared Wi-Fi connections” from backers, including Google, the Internet phone service provider Skype

DSCF0082

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Fixed: blog not displaying properly in Internet Explorer February 10, 2006

Posted by Andy Roberts in : tools , add a comment

I had heard that there might have been a slight problem with the way that this blog displays in Internet Explorer, but I hadn’t got around to checking it for myself. I don’t know why, well I do, it’s because I so rarely sit at a Windows machine these days and if I do then the first thing I’ll do is to install firefox. But despite the rise of Mozilla based browsers, the percentage of people still browsing the web with Internet Explorer is still something ridiculously high like 80 or 90% plus. So it’s not really a potential readership that you want to be displaying a large empty white space to!

So I’m trying to come to terms with the idea that for several months, nobody took the step of commenting or emailing me about it until yesterday. Maybe the tiny but sophisticated readership prefer other browsers as well, maybe those who do use IE thought the empty space was deliberate, or made the not unreasonable assumption that I must have been aware of it. Also thinking back - could this be the explanation for why some visitors left me feedback about the links in my sidebar ? LOL.

The solution was to edit the skin stylesheet and change the number 765 to 766.

The lesson learned is always to check any new website with all the available combinations of platform, browser and screen resolution. That’s something I originally knew many years ago when applied to static webpage design but mistakenly hadn’t transferred across to the re-use of opensource tools such as Wordpress and the Green Marinée theme (which in this case is orange).

There’s also a salutory lesson in there somewhere about not relying too much on the idea that somebody will always let me know if something’s not working, and about listening to bad news.

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