bodmas blog

Brass corners on the tables makes them last a few decades longer. Continuity expressed in small details.

The Herbert Gallery in Coventry is having a new wing added. In a glass case on one floor, there are some pages from a sketch book with drawings and some quotes by construction workers involved in the project over the summer. I snapped one page above on my mobile phone – I thought these quotes said a lot about the values of the people working on the project. Just up the hill by the Cathedral and the Guildhall, you can see mason’s marks from 1200 or so…

Cormac Faukner has an audio installation on the staircase in the Herbert Gallery – 16 loudspeakers are triggered as you walk past them – each plays a sample of an instrument, and some a sample of speeches made when the Herbert Gallery was opened in the 1960s. Faulkner is curating some more stuff in Coventry early September…

Watches, bicycles, cars, the art and language movement, the cybernetic culture research unit. Coventry has been the birth place for all these remarkable innovations but has suffered a bit of empty nest syndrome since they went on to live elsewhere. It is time to pull all these influences back and create a new Thing for Coventry.

The idea of a festival devoted to ‘artists who use technology invented in the past 100 years or so’ is interesting.

Harry Shaw’s bold colours and improvised typography came as a welcome antidote to IKEA induced trance. Ruth and I think this has to by rhyming slang, but we are still working out what for.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron installs easily (I have my home directory on a separate partition) from the Alpha v6 ISO and after 250Mb of upgrades appears to be working well. Flash actually installs when you click on the pop-up in Firefox.

The pie chart above is from the Disc Usage application that I think is new in Hardy. I like the layered display (sectors nearer the centre are directories lower down the tree). When you hover over a sector you get the directory name and the size in Gb.

If you are a member of the Institute for Learning, you will have received the Spring 2008 edition of InTuition. On page 8 is a few hundred words by me about blogging in education. In the article, I ask for examples of blogs, either about your teaching or used with your students. Post a comment to this article to add your examples!

Rob Kenyon who runs photography courses at Community Education Lewisham. Rob is using blogs and a flickr group to provide a publication opportunity for his photography students. Rob said

I feel that the blog is a natural teaching aid, and could change everything – once people get the idea. The online classroon approach could even, in theory, cut out a good deal of dreaded paperwork and help a lot with transparency and accountability, as in our sector.

Blogs showing the work of Rob’s students are linked below….

• http://satpix.blogspot.com/
• http://printinglewisham.blogspot.com
• http://photocourselewisham.blogspot.com/
• The group flickr account is at http://www.flickr.com/groups/cel/pool/

Lewisham can’t be the only place people are doing this – so keep them coming!

Contestability means that these people can compete with us for LSC funding. Love the apostrophes. Clever domain name.

Tasmin Little has been distributing a 30 minute CD as a free download for the last couple of months and has reached a quarter of a million downloads.

The CD features solo violin pieces by Bach, Paul Peterson (a composer who is still alive) and Ysaÿe. There is a comprehensive spoken commentary, and some notes for teachers. The package lasts around 45 minutes and can be downloaded in a high quality format. The recordings are direct, warm and sound great.

I can imagine popping these onto the iPods of open minded students. Alas, Ms Little has given the project a name that will guarantee that the page containing the downloads will be blocked by many FE College Web filters…

Five minutes on the how and why of using a class blog. There is an annoying loss of synch between the slides and the audio on the YouTube version that was not apparent on the Quicktime export from KeyNote. This must have happened during the processing on YouTube.

I’m using tumblr.com as an example of a blog publishing system as I like the category based layout. Alas, the audio and video upload uses flashplayer 9 and often does not work on MS Internet Explorer.