John Connell: The Blog

Inter­est­ing piece in Busi­ness Week this week on Sec­ond Life, look­ing at the num­ber of big cor­po­rates that have already estab­lished a pres­ence in this par­tic­u­lar vir­tual world. You may already know about the pres­ences set up by Reuters and the BBC, but the list of other big organ­i­sa­tions, both pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tor, who are test­ing the Sec­ond Life waters is long and grow­ing.

Amongst them:General Motors, Toy­ota, Nis­san, Audi, Warner Bros, Sony BMG, Pen­guin, MTV, 20^th Cen­tury Fox, Dell, Sun, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Adi­das, CNET, Wired, Edel­man, Voda­phone and Telus. And there are lots more besides these!

Dell, for instance, has a ‘fac­tory’ in the world that allows users to cus­tomize a PC and either buy a vir­tual one or have a real one shipped to you. They also have meet­ing rooms for staff. Gen­eral Motors use the envi­ron­ment to sell a cus­tomized ver­sion of the Pon­tiac Sol­stice. And so on…

As Busi­ness Week writes: “The cur­rent flood of com­pa­nies announc­ing a Sec­ond Life pres­ence echoes the late 90s, when every CEO wanted an e-commerce site.”

Philip Rosedale, CEO of Lin­den Labs, who own Sec­ond Life, sees the world as a 3-D web browser. His ambi­tious aim is, for instance, to allow your avatar to walk into a 3-D Ama­zon store, or sim­i­lar, browse shelves, buy stuff and chat over a vir­tual cup of coffee.

There are other such vir­tual worlds: you might take a look at Active Worlds, Habbo, Laguna Beach (Win­dows only, last time I looked) and Cyworld.

Post­script — See Kate Farrell’s recent men­tion of Teen Sec­ond Life — “The Global Kids island will be host­ing the SL part of a United Nations Forum on “Our Com­mon Human­ity in the Infor­ma­tion Age” on 29 Nov.” — Go see!

Tech­no­rati Tags: sec­ondlife, cor­po­rates, active­worlds , habbo, lagun­abeach, cyworld

I have Brian Crosby’s blog in my blogroll, but some­how I missed his piece on Con­struc­tivism. What­ever your thoughts on Con­struc­tivism, this is a great piece of writ­ing. You could almost take out the word ‘Con­struc­tive’ at the start of each sen­tence so that each sim­ply starts “Learn­ing is.….” and it still reads beau­ti­fully. Thank you, Brian.

Tech­no­rati Tags: brian crosby, con­struc­tivism, learn­ing

See David Muir’s post, derived from an orig­i­nal post by Tom Hoff­man.….and lots of oth­ers too!

<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.” title=&quotMartin Luther King”>Martin Luther King
Mar­tin Luther King
Mar­tin Luther King
Mar­tin Luther King
Mar­tin Luther King
Mar­tin Luther King
Mar­tin Luther King
Mar­tin Luther King
Mar­tin Luther King

If you haven’t already done so, please read the posts referred to and fol­low suit — do your good deed for the day! But please don’t link in your post to the malev­o­lent site that this is all about.…

Tech­no­rati Tags: infor­ma­tion­lit­er­acy, mar­tin luther king jr, mar­tin­lutherk­ing, antiracism

I bought a book in Syd­ney Air­port recently to pass away some time on the long trip home — How Soc­cer Explains the World, by Franklin Foer. The UK ver­sion sub­sti­tutes ‘foot­ball’ for ‘soc­cer’ in the title — although even the Aussies are start­ing to call foot­ball by its proper name these days, what with the recent suc­cess of the Soc­ceroos!

With chap­ters on the vio­lently nation­al­is­tic fol­low­ing of Red Star Bel­grade, on the Celtic-Rangers rivalry (inevitably), on Barcelona (Foer’s favourite team) as the sym­bol of the Cata­lan spirit, on the Euro­pean Jew­ish foot­ball teams, and more besides, it turned out to be a divert­ing if idio­syn­cratic read. Much of it I found I already knew at least a lit­tle about (and quite a lot about when it came to the Glas­gow divide), but the chap­ter that inter­ested me most was the final one: How Soc­cer Explains the Amer­i­can Cul­ture Wars.

I hadn’t realised — if it is indeed true — that soc­cer is seen in large parts of the USA as rep­re­sent­ing, “the fun­da­men­tal tenets of yup­pie par­ent­ing, the spirit of Sesame Street and Dr Ben­jamin Spock.” Baby boomer par­ents pre­fer soc­cer to the styl­ized vio­lence of Amer­i­can Foot­ball; they pre­fer the team spirit of soc­cer to the stress and the ‘ego-deflating encoun­ters’ that are part and par­cel of base­ball; and, at least until Larry Bird came along, they pre­ferred it to bas­ket­ball, the sport with the ‘hint of the ghetto’. But their lik­ing for soc­cer was diluted by their need to ‘min­i­mize the pain of com­pe­ti­tion’ for their pre­cious dar­lings — and so lit­tle league soc­cer has often been organ­ised in such a way that it min­i­mizes com­pe­ti­tion and the need-to-win atti­tude, and max­i­mizes par­tic­i­pa­tion. So, teams were often dis­solved and re-constituted each year ‘to pre­clude adults from build­ing their own dynasty ‘win at all costs’ sit­u­a­tions’. In some cases, all play­ers in a league were handed ‘par­tic­i­pa­tion’ tro­phies. Some leagues stopped post­ing scores. Some leagues banned head­ing the ball because of the ‘poten­tial’ for brain injury. And so on.…

The effect of all of this, accord­ing to Foer, is that, in just about every other part of the world, with a small num­ber of notable excep­tions, soc­cer is still the province of the work­ing classes (even if the biggest stars achieve very un-working-class salaries). But in the USA, apart from where it is played by Latino immi­grants, soc­cer is a game for the pro­fes­sional classes.

As a result, there is a big anti-soccer lobby in the USA. Tom Weir, of USA Today, has writ­ten that, “hat­ing soc­cer is more Amer­i­can than apple pie, dri­ving a pickup, or spend­ing Sat­ur­day after­noons chan­nel surf­ing with the remote con­trol.” Some, indeed, see soc­cer as a threat to the ‘Amer­i­can way of life’. Jack Kemp, in the 1980s, sought to make clear the dis­tinc­tion between ‘demo­c­ra­tic, cap­i­tal­is­tic foot­ball’, and ‘Euro­pean, social­ist soc­cer’. As Jim Rome said, “My son is not play­ing soc­cer. I will hand him ice skates and a shim­mer­ing sequined blouse before I hand him a soc­cer ball.”

Ulti­mately, Foer sees the dif­fer­ing opin­ions on soc­cer in the USA as an exam­ple of the fear that glob­al­iza­tion is caus­ing many of his own coun­try­men — it is a touch­stone in the cul­tural divide between the ‘Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ists’ and those who, per­haps, share their cutural val­ues more with Euro­peans. Pro­tect­ing ‘real Amer­i­can sports’ is an ana­logue of pro­tect­ing the good ol’ US of A against the effects of this flat­ten­ing world.

Still, this inter­nal cul­tural divide did not stop the USA national team from going as high as 4^th in FIFA’s world rank­ings at one point, although they have since dropped a long way down the list, to the extent that even Scot­land has once again over­taken them!

Tech­no­rati Tags: soc­cer, foot­ball, usa, cul­ture, soc­ceroos, scot­land, aus­tralia, foer, franklin foer, celtic, rangers, red­star­bel­grade, ser­bia

Euan Semple’s post this morn­ing on Where is the art? had hints (echoes?) of his own ear­lier post on the echo cham­ber. His argu­ment there was that, as a blog­ger, far from find­ing him­self in an echo cham­ber, he often finds him­self get­ting, “dragged kick­ing and scream­ing into areas of thought I would never go near normally.”

My expe­ri­ence is the same. Despite the fact that I do grav­i­tate towards those whose views I have sym­pa­thy for, I am also long enough in the tooth to know that there are areas of moral­ity, phi­los­o­phy, pol­i­tics, foot­ball, belief.…you name it!.…where my views are my own, and my own com­bi­na­tion of atti­tudes is sim­ply not repli­cated in any­one else. This, of course, is the same for every­one — the con­cept of the soul mate can only ever be relative!

So, by seek­ing the views of those I agree with in one or two areas at any one time, I inevitably come across opin­ions and ref­er­ences that sur­prise me or even irri­tate me. My own views are ques­tioned and tested, and the dialec­tic of the process of ratio­nal­iz­ing such views then allows me to re-define my own, or not.

A good anal­ogy, per­haps, is that I learned to appre­ci­ate a lot of good music from my two kids, music that I often chose to scorn even before I had really lis­tened to it — hear­ing the same track from the Red Hot Chilli Pep­pers. 10 times a week gave me the chance to decide that, just maybe, pos­si­bly, reluc­tantly, there might be some gen­uine musi­cal merit in that thin gui­tar sound and the stran­gu­lated vocals. My musi­cal edu­ca­tion was enhanced by com­ing up against artistes that, as I say above, chal­lenged my musi­cal prej­u­dices. With both kids now away from home at uni­ver­sity, my musi­cal jour­ney might shunt itself into more com­fort­able, less chal­leng­ing territory.

(By the way.…don’t let them know that I was actu­ally lis­ten­ing and learn­ing through all those years!)

It would be pos­si­ble, prob­a­bly, with the range of new tech­nolo­gies and the ever-expanding range of online media out­lets, to iso­late your­self within a bub­ble of self-selected infor­ma­tion, and to build your­self a self-cosseting com­fort zone deep within a pre­dictable knowl­edge land­scape, shielded from intel­lec­tual or emo­tional provo­ca­tion. This sce­nario, iron­i­cally, is the inverse of the ‘Big Brother’ con­cept, since it is not some cen­tral­ized, exter­nal agency that is deter­min­ing the infor­ma­tion we are allowed access to — we would be impos­ing this self-controlled, self-adjusted and self-validating infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment on ourselves.

So, Euan is right, that blog­ging is a tool, and the blo­gos­phere an envi­ron­ment, that ren­ders this kind of self-imposed iso­la­tion dif­fi­cult to achieve, even if we wanted to.

Tech­no­rati Tags: euansem­ple, echocham­ber, big­brother, dialec­tic

Want access to thou­sands of free down­load­able com­puter books? Try KickJava’s mas­sive tag cloud of free titles.

Tech­no­rati Tags: kick­java, books, com­put­ing, tag­cloud

10 Down­ing Street has set up an online peti­tion sys­tem (called — what else could they be called? — E-Petitions).

“Peti­tions have long been sent to the Prime Min­is­ter by post or deliv­ered to the Num­ber 10 door in per­son. You can now both cre­ate and sign peti­tions on this web­site too, giv­ing you the oppor­tu­nity to reach a poten­tially wider audi­ence and to deliver your peti­tion directly to Down­ing Street.”

Good to see that Suw Char­man has got in on the act quickly with a peti­tion seek­ing to bring the UK’s copy­right laws into the 21^st Cen­tury. Get your name on there!

Post­script — I should note, of course, that the Scot­tish Par­lia­ment has had its own E-Petitions capa­bil­ity for some time now, although its exe­cu­tion is not nearly as sim­ple as Westminster’s ver­sion above. A glance at the list of peti­tions (‘E’ and oth­er­wise) sub­mit­ted to Holy­rood per­haps illus­trates the chal­lenge that any poten­tial peti­tioner faces: the sheer num­ber and range of peti­tions inevitably dilutes the capac­ity for any one peti­tion to gain real ground in the leg­isla­tive process. The Scot­tish peti­tions range from the sen­si­ble to the sub­limely ridicu­lous: from “debate on the removal of the Scot­tish Foot­ball Team’s man­age­ment regime”, to “national pol­icy on singing”, to a “national dance hall” — these are the sorts of peti­tion that the more wor­thy and deserv­ing cam­paigns have to com­pete with. Still — democ­racy can be a messy busi­ness — but we have to trust that the com­mend­able will occa­sion­ally prevail.

Tech­no­rati Tags: e-petition, 10downingstreet, corante, copy­right, scottishparliament

I first came across a ref­er­ence to the Grameen Bank in Jef­frey Sachs’ book The End of Poverty. The bank, in tan­dem with the Bangladeshi Rural Advance­ment Com­mit­tee (BRAC), had pio­neered the con­cept of micro­cre­dit, in which small loans, usu­ally of just a few hun­dred dol­lars, were given to poor peo­ple, often women, to finance microbusi­nesses. Scal­ing this type of financ­ing to large groups, at very low rates of inter­est, proved viable — and the effects have been astound­ing in places.

I recalled this ref­er­ence when I saw the announce­ment that the Grameen Bank and its founder, Dr Mohammed Yunus had been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Any­one who doubts the link between a bank, even one car­ry­ing out bril­liant work such as this with the world’s poor, and world peace should read the arti­cle by Jef­frey Gangemi in Busi­ness Week Online. He writes:

“While he may not be bro­ker­ing treaties, he’s actu­ally pro­mot­ing peace by uproot­ing one of the root causes of con­flict: poverty. At the same time, he’s demon­strat­ing how effec­tive entre­pre­neuri­al­ism can be.”

And, see the reader com­ments by ‘Heidi’ and oth­ers for some indi­ca­tion of the pos­i­tive effects of micro­fi­nance.

The con­cept of micro­fi­nance is seen by some as a coun­ter­weight, or even as an alter­na­tive, to large scale inter­na­tional devel­op­ment aid, but it needs much greater com­mit­ment from gov­ern­ments world­wide and from other poten­tial sources if it is to begin to make seri­ous inroads into poverty in the devel­op­ing world. It is per­haps an affir­ma­tive straw in the wind that both the Michael and Susan Dell Foun­da­tion and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foun­da­tion are tak­ing an inter­est in the concept.

And its rel­e­vance to edu­ca­tion? Take a look at the Global Devel­op­ment Research Cen­tre (GDRC) — its Vir­tual Library has some inter­est­ing mate­r­ial.

Tech­no­rati Tags: grameen, yunus, micro­fi­nance, busi­ness­week, gdrc, gates­foun­da­tion, dell­foun­da­tion, nobel­pea­ceprize

Ah well — this explains why I’m not a bet­ting man! See my ear­lier post.

Tech­no­rati Tags: peterpea­cock, scot­tishex­ec­u­tive, jackm­c­connell, hugh­henry, peter pea­cock, hugh henry

The BBC Edu­ca­tion site has a nice line in spoof arti­cles, the first of which is called: Foun­tain pens boost self-esteem.

I won­der how many read­ers out there will be taken in by such an obvi­ous piece of drollery?

Watch out for arti­cles about bring­ing back spelling bees.……still, if it raises a smile.….

Tech­no­rati Tags: foun­tain­pen, oldtech­nol­ogy, crass stu­pid­ity, pri­va­tee­d­u­ca­tion