Google Glass, dreich day and flowers

In The Guardian which hangs expectantly in my letter box each morning when I get up, a recent article on Google Glass, the latest product in wearable computing. There’s a picture of Google’s Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google wearing what looks like a pair of glasses with the lenses removed, and a little camera attachment added. The “glasses” can take photos or video and are voice controlled “OK glass, take a picture” is one of the examples cited in the article. Now, this sounds like my sort of technology. On this blog, I’ve commented more than once that, while out on my bike, if I could only blink my eye and take a photo, I’d get great shots, like the other day, out with my mate John, and a buzzard flew just over John’s head. I’d never get this shot with my SLR camera or my phone camera. So, potentially a great new toy for us? The concerns in the article are about privacy and the author gives an example of a Glass wearer in a cafe, taking a video of the people there – without their knowledge of permission. Not only does this breach privacy but the fact that Google will retain all the footage taken by the Glass, is also potentially worrying e.g. what will Google do with all the video/photos? Of course, this could happen with a mobile phone in the same cafe but the argument is that we are more likely to see people videoing us in the cafe, than we are to notice the Glass, which will be developed to be part of normal glasses and indistinguishable from them. Technology and privacy is not a new problem, of course, but it would be good if some guarantees on privacy were forthcoming from Google.

In Dunbar today, it’s very dull, raining on and off, and there’s  a strong north easterly wind coming off the sea. It’s what we call a dreich (pronunciation) day in Scotland. The sea is a deep metallic grey and the sky is a a mix of dull white in parts, with lumps of dark grey cloud whizzing by. The wind will cut your face if you face east for long enough. There’s a biggish tide rolling in and an endless succession of white waves are fighting each other to get to the shore first. My grandfather used to say “Aye, it’s a day for the fire” i.e. sitting around a coal fire. Having said that, my wife went for a run this morning and I’m going cycling tomorrow when the forecast is the same, only a stronger wind. Photos 1 and 2 show the scene from the back of our house.

As Sunday is Mother’s Day in the UK, flowers arrived yesterday from our son, daughter in law and grandchildren in Dubai. Photos 3 and 4 show the flowers as a whole and a close up of one of the roses. If you look closely at the rose, could that be a Google Glass filming you from the middle of the flower?

Dreich day in Dunbar

 

Sea on a wild day

Flowers and reflection

 

Rose and Google Glass?

Digital maps, horse at the beach and The Library Bar

An interesting article in today’s Guardian about digital maps. The article not only reviews how people increasingly use digital maps – for directions or to find a restaurant, pub or shop in a particular area, but also looks at how digital mapping has developed very rapidly in the fast few years. We all know about Google Earth but Google have plans to extend the coverage of the world’s cities as well as “hiking trails, narrow alleyways or the forest floor”. Not to be outdone, Apple are planning to replace Google Maps on IPads and IPhones with what they claim will be a superior technology. The article also raises the question of whether advanced mapping systems are not only helping us find our way about, but may actually be tracking us i.e. recording where and when we use a digital map. The pros and cons of this are debated well in the article, with a range of expertise quoted.

Going for a walk at Belhaven Beach recently, just as the sun was going down, I came across a man on a horse, just about to cross the stream that runs under the bridge. The picture below was taken on my mobile phone, so not as good quality as my Canon 1000D which I normally use, but still captures the moment. For once, there was no wind on the beach, just a calm sunset. The 2nd photo was taken by me on a day out in Edinburgh and a nostalgic walk round part of Edinburgh University where I was an undergraduate history student from 1967 to 1971 (still find it hard to believe how many years ago that is). The photo is taken at the University Union. The interesting part about this photo is that the part of the building which is now the Library Bar, used to be the Library – a place where students could study in quiet. There was of course, a large bar downstairs. This poses a question: if a library becomes a bar, is this progress or regress?

Horse at Belhaven beach

The Library Bar

Rotary talk and Paul Farley poems

The blog has taken a back seat lately but I hope to increase the posting – a blog has to be regularly produced and have a clear purpose, so I’m rethinking that. On Monday, I was the speaker at Dunbar Rotary Club and I talked about improving students’ use of the web. My sister Elaine is the current president of the club and indeed, the first female president. What was interesting was that the audience almost totally expected me to talk about searching the web i.e. they associated use of the web, with searching. My focus was on “reading” images and video. I got the attendees to be my Year 7 class and asked them to discuss what they remembered after seeing some images and then a video. I then stressed that we wanted school students to be critical readers of what they find on the web. It was clear that most of the audience had not taken this kind of critical view themselves when using the web, and many told me that it was a learning experience. My final image (see below) was a kangaroo at Pomingalarna in Wagga Wagga. The audience admired the cuteness of kangaroo and the view of the Australian bush – a very positive photo? Not completely, as the photo also contains some Paterson’s Curse, an invasive weed.

The latest Poetry Book Society Choice is The Dark Film by Paul Farley. It’s a collection with striking imagery, sometimes of everyday objects. For example, in Quality Street, a box of sweets is seen through a child’s eyes. Many of us will remember unwrapping Quality Street sweets, holding the coloured paper in front of our eyes and seeing the effect on our surroundings. Farley’s poem starts with red: ‘The wrapper of a strawberry cream/ unpeels a vivid red to dye/ the evening bloody monochrome’. InThe Airbrake People, a child listens to the sounds of lorries’ air brakes: ‘I’d count the minutes between each hiss:/ all exhalation, nothing but dying fall/ as if the night itself received a puncture’. This is a book of poems to savour – read each one at least twice and then go back the next day and you’ll reveal even more hidden depth.

Kangaroo at Pomingalarna

Digital human, Shardlake and Dubai

Out on my bike last week, I listened to a new BBC Radio series The Digital Human - a title which should engender discussion on its own. Is there such a thing as a digital human? Many of us now lead lives which involves using digital media for different parts of our lives e.g. education, research, music, fiction, sport and online buying. So, a catchy but inherently meaningless title. The content however, may be of interest. I listened to Episode 3 which was about threats to privacy and what counts as privacy in different cultures. I found most of it interesting although some of the people interviewed were very much involved in the web as a source of employment/income, so not your ordinary web users. It’s worth a listen although it may not be to everyone’s taste. It’s probably worth alerting older students in schools to the programme – which is available around the world on the BBC IPlayer, whereas BBC TV is not available outside the UK – as it may well interest them.

I’ve started to read another of C J Samson’s series, set in England at the time of Henry VIII and featuring the lawyer Shardlake and his assistant Barak. The new novel is Heartstone in which Shardlake is asked to investigate a case for the Queen. Sansom’s books are full of intricate historical detail and you do get a feel for London at this time. He also provides a background of politics e.g. Henry’s abortive invasion of France, and the rivalries between different court factions. There’s also a good plot in all the books with some murder and mayhem thrown in. The books are easy to read and while they are not just holiday reads, they are not likely to be on the Booker Prize list.

Back in Dubai for just under a week to see our son, daughter in law and twin granddaughters. It is hot! The temperature guage at the back door today has a reading of 41 degrees. Walking round the lake this morning at 36 degrees was tolerable but when it gets to 40 degrees, it just gets intolerable. When I lived in Wagga Wagga, the temperature did get into the 40s at times during the summer but only for short periods. Here in Dubai, you are literally in the middle of the desert, so temperatures will go even higher over the next two months. The photos below are from a previous visit and show a bird’s eye view from the 126th floor of the Burj Khalifa. This was on a clear day. Yesterday, there was sand in the air you would not have seen very much at all.

View from Burj Khalifa

View from Burj Khalifa

 

 

Start the Week, cycling and 20 mile run

Out on my bike (see below), I like to listen to downloaded podcasts from BBC Radio. I do this safely i.e. I have the volume set so that I can hear the podcasts, but not too loud as I need to hear traffic coming up behind me. One of my favourite listens is Start the Week in which Andrew Marr discusses topics with 4 guests. This week it was digital futures and the panel discussed how technology might change our lives even further in the future e.g. how games may be seen as more acceptable by a wider range of people, and not be seen just as an opportunity to kill people on screen. One particular issue discussed was augmented reality which has been around for a few years but may be taking new directions. One of the guests was Anab Jain who talked about designing augmented reality tools which might enable some blind people to have some vision, as well as other concepts. I remember teaching a course on IT and Society in the early 1990s and talking with students about the possibility of watching a play or a football (soccer) match on your coffee table. It appears that this may not be that far away.

So, back on the bike and up the hills. The only way to do hills more easily is to do hills more often. Hills are the cyclist’s challenges and, while there is obviously a physical effort and fitness aspect to hills, much is psychological. Yesterday, I did well to get up a very steep climb in the Lammermuir Hills at Elmscleugh where there’s a 174 metre rise to the top. At certain points, I thought that I had done well and should maybe just turn around and enjoy the thrill of the downhill. At times like these, you need to switch off your head and let your legs take over.

The 20 mile run – not me of course but my older son and 180 others, including some from Dunbar Running Club ran from Edinburgh to the seaside town of North Berwick, which is about 12 miles (19.3k) from my home. The photos below show firstly, my son Jonathan finishing at the edge of the beach, and secondly, the view along the beach towards the harbour. This being Scotland, it wasn’t as warm as it looks.

20 mile race finish at North Berwick

North Berwick Beach

Internet: free or controlled? and Loch Katrine

Sharp eyed readers will note that this is being written on a Wednesday (or Thursday if you are in Australasia) and that the promised Monday entry did not materialise. This was due to a hotel wanting to charge a ridiculous amount for Internet access. There has been a series of articles in The Guardian newspaper recently. The articles cover a range of issues, including what Google knows about our internet use, how Facebook and Twitter are essentially restrictive in how we use the internet, and questions such as ‘Can the internet be civilised? This question looks at how much porn there is available and whether it should be curtailed, and also whether tools such as Facebook and Twitter can be made part of the laws of different countries e.g. in relation to libel. So, this covers a great deal of ground. In relation to schools, I think that it’s important that we raise these questions with our students and one role the TL or SL can play in the school is to try to ensure that debates on the internet take place or that students are taught to question their own use of the web e.g. in relation to ethics.

Just back from a visit to The Trossachs (which is from the Gaelic [Scottish version pronounced Gallic] for ‘A bristly place’) in central Scotland. This is an area of extensive woodland and large lochs (aka lakes). The most famous is Loch Katrine (pr Katrinn) which was made famous by Sir Walter Scott in his poem ‘Lady of the Lake’. On the day of our walk, there were a host of threatening clouds moving funereally across the sky but our 5 mile walk along the loch side was only briefly interrupted by a shower. When we were leaving, the rain came down in what Thomas Hardy referred to as ‘silken strings’. The views across the loch to the mountains and hills are stunning and in the summer, 2 boats take loads of tourists across the loch and back. There was only one boat on the day of our visit, with a multilingual chatter coming from the queue as we  passed. One of the features of the walk along the loch side at this time of year, is the new leaves on the silver birch trees and the photos below shows the trees lining the loch, with Ben Venue towering above them, and looking up to the trees with the mountain behind.

Brainshark, BlipFoto and Snowdrops (the Russian version)

I’ve just tried out a new tool for presenting a series of photographs (or it could be PowerPoint slides) called Brainshark. The novelty of using Brainshark (no idea why it’s called that) is that you can attach commentary to your photos or slides. Now I know that you may have added sound to PowerPoint but I’ve always had problems with that. This is much more simple – you upload the photos and add your commentary to each one, save each one as you go along, save the presentation and send the link to your friends, colleagues or students. It’s also a tool which students could benefit from learning. An example of my effort can be viewed (and heard) here and it contains what one conference organiser, who was introducing me, called my ‘dulcet Celtic tones” – see what you think.

A very new photo-related site was introduced to me (and many others) last night when I attended the Professorial Lecture of my former colleague Hazel Hall. You can view the whole presentation – on social informatics. As I was Hazel’s first boss as a lecturer when she came to Edinburgh, I was delighted to see her as a Professor. Hazel referred to Blipfoto which is a site on to which you can load photos and comment on them – so far, so not very original. What’s neat about Blipfoto is that encourages you to keep a journal by taking a photo every day and building up an archive. You can also search the site. I think it’s a neat tool but of course, as Hazel said in her lecture – it can be addictive.

I recently read Snowdrops an intriguing novel set in modern Russia. Snowdrops in this context are bodies which emerge from the ice after the Russian winter, and some of them have come to a sticky end. Very well written and very atmospheric. The snowdrops hereabouts are past now and have been replaced by later spring flowers, some of which, from my garden, are in the photo below.

Tulips and tete a tetes

Collaboration, Redemption Falls and primroses

Since retiring, I have unsubscribed to most of the listservs and educational sites which emailed me regularly but, for some reason, I haven’t stopped getting eSchoolNews. This week, a headline caught my eye about ‘Teacher collaboration with digital tools’ – I guess because collaboration has been a hot topic of debate and research amongst teacher/school librarians for the past 40 years, and because I have written about this topic and had my students debate aspects of collaboration on forums. This feature has a series of links to reports, research and tools which it may be useful to dip into, and selectively distribute within your school, or to TL/SL colleagues.

On the fiction front, I have just finished reading Joseph O’Connor’s ‘Redemption Falls’. The Guardian reviewer calls it ‘a huge dishevelled monster of a book’ because it contains not only a striking narrative, but also folk ballads, songs, documents and transcripts. So, your straightforward novel it is not. It is also very detailed and descriptive in places. While not all of the voices in the book are completely convincing, this tale of post civil war America, and of the American Irish involvement in both the war and its aftermath, is nevertheless an outstanding read. You need a fairly strong stomach when reading parts of it e.g. the atrocities of the war witnessed by a drummer boy, and the savage treatment of his sister who crossed the states to find him. The protagonist O’Keefe is loved by some and hated by many. If you like your fiction strong, with a forceful narrative and a range of intriguing (in some cases weird) characters, then this book is for you.

 Now that Spring is well on its way, the primrose/polyanthus plants in my garden are in full flower. The two flowers are different although the terms are used interchangeably. The one in the photo below is (I think) a polyanthus. It is one of these flowers that are very much plain Janes or Johns when not in flower, but are radically changed when the flowers appear and you get this dash of colours in your Spring garden. They also flower more than once a year, so are very thrift plants also.

Polyanthus

40 years of school libraries and the Berwick viaduct

Firstly, I should tell you all that this is the final entry for this blog in its present format. I retire from CSU and the academic life tomorrow (31st January 2012). The blog will continue but will not always feature comment on something of an educational nature, which is relevant to TLs and SLs around the world. However, it may still be ‘educational’ in the wider sense of the word. The photographic content will continue. I have been involved with school libraries for 40 years this year and the vast majority of these years has been in the role of educator. Are school libraries as recognisable as they were in the early 1970s? To some extent they are, given that the space they occupy is still about the same in most schools, and that a range of bookshelves is still one of the dominant features. The addition of ICT hardware has changed the look of school libraries in most parts of the world, where schools can afford such equipment. Are teacher librarians or school librarians different? This is an intriguing question. It might be argued that the knowledge base of todays TLs and SLs is different, given the developments in ICT. The language used by today’s TLs and SLs would have been, to a great extent, unrecognisable to those of 40 years ago. On the other hand, the desire to actively contribute to learning and teaching in the school remains the same. Also, over the years, the most effective TLs and SLs have been able to be innovators in their schools, particularly in the areas of information literacy. So the terminology may be different but the mindset may still be the same. The look of school libraries is about to change over the next few years – printed books and journals will disappear for the most part in most school libraries – but the purpose of the school library/learning commons/i-centre/e-centre will remain the same. I’m intending to write soem articles about this in the near future and will expand on these points.

At the weekend, my marathon/half-marathon/10K running wife and I were down at the border town of Berwick to watch a cross country race, in which the runners crossed Spittal Beach before climbing up a ridge, running on track and returning via the same route. One of the features of Berwick – Berwick Upon Tweed to give the town its full name – is the viaduct which was built to enable the railway to cross over the estuary. Known as The Royal Border Bridge, this magnificent piece of engineering an architecture was designed by Robert Stephenson and opened by Queen Victoria in 1850. As the photo below shows, it has certainly stood the test of time, and if you are on the train going north or south through Berwick, you get superb views along the river and the estuary.

Berwick viaduct

No Wikipedia for a day and harbour walk

Reading today’s Guardian with my breakfast cup of tea, I find an intriguing story about how  Wikipedia is planning to shut down for 24 hours in protest at a proposed bill in the USA, which Wikipedia claim will lead to a form of censorship on new media outlets such as itself, Google and Twitter. I’ve just tried to access Wikipedia and instead of being able to search, there’s a black screen with Imagine a world without free knowledge as the headline, and accuses the US Congress of ‘considering legislation that could damage the free and open Internet’. The article goes on to cite the views of both new media and ‘old’ media such as a newspaper proprietor. The bills which are being proposed, appear to be trying to stop illegal streaming, but Wikipedia and others think that this could be the thin edge of censorship.

One of the pleasures of living in a seaside town such as Dunbar, is that you can enjoy a walk to, or around, the harbour at all times of the year. Normally, in January, the bridge connecting the new (i.e. 1890s built) harbour and the old harbour, is up, so that boats can go to the old harbour for shelter from the winter storms. However, it’s been unseasonably mild and calm this winter, so on Sunday, the bridge was down and my wife and I walked across to the harbour wall side. The picture below shows a view towards Dunbar Castle  with a set of creels roughly stacked, in the foreground. There are a few boats in the harbour which use creels to catch crabs and lobsters, and you can see a creel boat in action off the Fife coast (visible from Dunbar) on YouTube.

Creels on Dunbar Harbour