Using Media for Social Change

Since I last blogged 3 months ago so many things have happened to help set me on a path for future work. I’ve been fortunate enough to have funding to attend attend a conference on Digital Storytelling, hosted by the Center for Digital Storytelling in partnership with the Luso-American foundation in Portugal, and a week long International School for Digital Transformation, also in Portugal. I have also started my community fieldwork case studies and completed my classroom based case studies.

In each of these, I have met some inspiration people who have helped me to see the world in a slightly different way. Rather than gazing with terror at how badly broken our social structures are, I can see the cracks and in some cases how issues are intertwined and form the cracks, but also tiny little bridges starting to appear over them.

This video was just tweeted by one of the inspirational faculty members I met at ISDT09, and it represents one of those bridges. “Playing for Change” shows how music crosses cultural boundaries so beautifully and how technology facilitates such collaborations. And it is a really enjoyable way of spending 5 minutes.

Opportunities to learn abroad

The last 2 weeks have bought absolute mayhem to my working day. In April, I submitted abstract to one conference and one international week-long school. I was informed over the bank holiday weekend that I had been accepted by both. The delight soon gave way to despair when I realised that finding funding to attend both would be a headache in itself; going through the laborious process of applying to the University to get permission to go is stuff that migraines are made of.

This week I have been particularly focusing on the International School on Digital Transformation to be held at the University of Porto, Portugal, as the deadline for payment is next Monday. There was tough competition to be awarded a place, and so there is a waiting list of potential candidates. So understandably, the organisers need to know yesterday who can go and will only accept full payment as confirmation.

So I have requested to put all of next year’s modest PhD budget towards it. The remainder I will have to either fund myself, or hope that the faculty can help. The difference will not be too much to prevent me going, UNLESS the flight nightmare does not improve. It seems that Porto is not on the well-trampled [flight] path for Brits, and Lisbon is a 3 hour train ride south.

Here’s the thing; traveling when you are the primary designated carer of children in a family becomes an issue straight away. Strained agreements to go away does not indicate a lack of support in career-building opportunities, it just always becomes so stressful to leave the children under whatever arrangements and they are usually unsettled for a couple of weeks afterwards.

So every day away is problematic, and therefore my trips have to center around flying on the day I start the conference/workshop and flying back the day I finish.  This also constrain the number of airports I can fly from and to as travel time at this end is an issue.

When destinations aren’t well represented with direct flights, I have the added strain of extended travel durations with one or more airport transfers.

I have seen some suggested flights that are 20 hours long (2 transfers) that take in a night stop, and are costed at over £1,200.  This is the extreme, but there are plenty of options with 2 stops and priced at £450+. So if I am topping up the cost of the trip, I’m still not 100% sure I’m going to be able to manage it, however much I want to go. hence spending far too much time scouring the net for a reasonable flight combination, whilst chasing the form signing back on campus. I don’t even get to book the flights, the decision is ultimately in the hands of the designated supplier of the University.

I’m just wondering how impolite it would be to phone the International Office back to find out if my application has been signed today. Just bearing in mind Monday’s deadline…

Good Friday

Whilst I’ve been questioning my relationship with religion more than I can ever remember of late, Good Friday never fails to fill me with an overwhelming sense of sorrow.

Don’t get me wrong, my faith in God is resolute; instead I question the necessity of the doctrine that organised Christianity builds its empire upon. It’s really just people’s opinions and memories of events told as stories for learning. Opinions that were crafted into guidelines for society 2,000 years ago don’t necessarily translate well today.

I feel such sorrow today, as I remember this incredible man who was prepared to act as an agent for social change knowing how unpopular his actions may be with those who held the power to control his life. And even then, it was the masses rather than the authoritarians who chose to end his life in such a barbaric way. Jesus died on Good Friday and every year I spend the day reflecting, unable to shake the sadness that society would not tolerate change and further inflict such pain on those who didn’t fit the mold.

I did smile this week when James (5) bought home his Easter work including a Hosanna banner. His version of a smiling Jesus superimposed on a cross on a bright yellow background is so delightful. I praised him for writing Hosanna so beautifully and remembering to draw Jesus’ fingers of course. I asked James to recount the story of Good Friday to me, it became clear that certain details hadn’t been of significance to him (such as Jesus himself being nailed to the cross) as such horror wouldn’t enter his beautifully naive mind.

The true cost of childcare

My younger son was 4 months old when I interviewed for a PhD scholarship, he was 10 months old when I started. I was also completing a PCGE, so when he was 3 months old he started spending small amounts of time with a very carefully selected child minder; chosen for her qualities as mother first and foremost and the fact that she was very experienced at bringing up children in her family home having created a warm, nurturing environment.

I have always been exceptionally pleased with the service she has extended to us. Over recent months, I’ve also been aware that she has been increasingly forced into workshop attendance and subsequent form-filling, policy making and other time-hungry tasks.

This rigid framework now being imposed on the mother-figure specially selected for our babies is really at odds with what we cared about. The more time taken up with administrative tasks, the less time she is able to spend with our child.

It came as no surprise last month that our childminder has decided to use her experience elsewhere as the pleasure of raising of children has been increasingly sucked out of the job. And, actually, I really support her decision.

So I am now in the position of searching for a new childcare provider come the new academic year. This has the potential to be quite damaging to my own ability to carry out my work, not to mention disrupting the emotional security of my children.

We wanted a mother-figure who could raise children. The government want a mother-figure who can evidence meeting predefined criteria through multiple documents.

Where will this documentation culture end?

Best-practice is a wonderful thing, but a top-down enforced structure is not the way to draw out good will. Zygmunt Bauman (2001) has been informing a lot of my thinking about the concept of a community of late, and his description of how workers’ social structures were first broken and then re-established to force behavioural norms to adapt to the industrial revolution are not totally dissimilar to the enforced changes in practice of childcare. Whilst clearly not cruel, I would argue that it is very unnerving and stressful to both our childminder and us.

Incidentally, I still haven’t found a suitable alternative….

Ada Lovelace Day

It’s Ada Lovelace Day today. I’m wondering which woman in IT I could blog about, as there are so many inspirational women out there working hard to create a more balanced society through technology or otherwise.

The first woman who really drew my attention to the world of IT was my mother. She started an OU degree when she was pregnant with me, and after long spells of inactivity, picked through modules of interest one by one. As the years went by, her focus shifted towards technology. I remember one day in 1986 accompanying her on a specially planned trip to the town library in Bracknell. She had booked half an hour on the modem to complete part of an assignment. I was puzzled that the Bakelite phone receiver could ‘talk’ to a computer in another room when placed on the mediatory device, which looked as though it might have been made by the Blue Peter team out of yoghurt pots and cardboard boxes, and painted shiny grey. Mum assured me that this was a perfectly normal thing to do and that one day I would get to use a modem too.

We weren’t really well equipped at school with the latest technology, but with our house being full of various computers it’s no surprise that I ended up taking a degree in IT. I still have our Spectrum 48k in the loft, and I’m looking forward to showing it to my sons one day, if it still works. The 7 minute wait for Hungry Horrace might teach them the art of patience, a skill that the CBeebies website doesn’t usually require.

Having listened intently to Emma McGrattan (Senior VP of Engineering at Ingres) speaking at Girl Geek Dinners recently, I’ve taken time to think about the gender balance in the world of IT, and what it means to be a woman in such a profession. Before I went into teaching, I was quite used to being surrounded by male colleagues. The ratio is bound to change over time, as social technology becomes ingrained in the human psyche.

But for now, Happy Ada Lovelace Day and thank you to my Mum for being such a great inspiration.

The Power of Social Networking

In October 2007 I started teaching on the ‘Communities On-Line’ module at Leeds Metropolitan University. It was a module originally designed and developed by Professor Janet Finlay and Lynette Willoughby, and taken forward by Steve Walker afterwards. In that month (as I write this, only 18 months ago), facebook had reached the 50 million user mark (1:facebook.com). Not all of our module students had their own facebook profile at the start of the module. Most of them had become regular users by the end of the module, in January 2008.

From the  reflections and analysis we received from the students in that academic year, it was clear that on the whole, their imagination for the power of social networking was limited to arranging pub nights and commenting on photos, with of course the exception of one or two more wide-reaching minds. So we set up a group to discuss any module related ideas and I shared information on my wall. It was a reasonably active meeting place for the duration of the module.

This year, the more techie-literate and enlightened students are using Twitter to harness the power of information sharing, and I don’t just mean pub socials, I mean software plug ins, interesting projects, reported events and so on.

Like many others’ anecdotal accounts of Twitter, until very recently I wasn’t sure of the purpose. But now I am an avid fan.  And in the last 4 hours, an amazing thing happened.

I had been recommended a couple of high-profile twitter pages to follow, and through following links to blogs in the Bios I came across a Digital Story posted yesterday by Courage Campaign in the States. http://vimeo.com/3089746 The issue struck a chord with me, as with any social injustice, and I tweeted the link asking readers “Please share widely”.  I’m fairly new to Twitter and don’t have many followers, but within 2 hours both AmnestyUK and Janet Finlay had both retweeted my link, and AmnestyUK has 1,247 followers alone. Of Janet’s followers, some of those have retweeted too.

This is nothing out of the ordinary, that’s how Twitter works. But it’s the first time I have been directly involved with viewing the chain, and it’s been very exciting. And it’s been a very good illustration for me of the power of social networking.

And it’s interesting that in the space of 18 months, the majority of my students haven’t used facebook as a tool for sharing module-related issues. And I haven’t particularly suggested it either. I still post news stories and related materials on my wall, but there is no group and much lower interest. But the phenomenon of facebook has dramatically increased membership worldwide with over 150 million users at the start of 2009 (2: thefuturebuzz.com).

So for those students who are active in this area, and also non-academic peers who didn’t previously make use of the sharing facility, the visibility of networks to rapidly disseminate stories is creating an amazing information channel.

References:

1: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics#/press/info.php?timeline (accessed 6th February 2009)

2: http://thefuturebuzz.com/2009/01/12/social-media-web-20-internet-numbers-stats/ (accessed 6th Febrary 2009)

Towards Open-Source

Being relatively new to blogging as well on the periphory of understanding code manipulation, I’ve been trying to get my head around the WordPress interface. I have had a Blogger account for a while (albeit underused) and found that interface most agreeable, certainly no link searching or head scratching.

But, and it is a bit but, Blogger is owned by people who make a lot of money and exert a lot of directional influence and therefore control. Over the last year I have gradually come to realise that I do not feel comfortable with plugging into that matrix and feeding it my thoughts directly. So I have chosen an Open-Source alternative to air my thoughts from now on.

Of course, I understand that these thoughts can be picked up and read by any search engine; I decided to allow my posts to be included in external searches. In the spirit of collaboration it would be a shame to restrict access. I will review that decision from time to time.

I love the FLOSS movement and I love the freedom that Web 2.0 can bring. It’s time for users to start questioning the freedom of information sharing versus the cost of privacy.

And now to get to grips with customising my blog… I may be some time….

The Year of the Intervention

2009 already! And still no more progress on the interventions starting. I have a funding issue that is yet to be resolved, although I did have a very (hopefully) productive meeting with our financial manager in the faculty today. He seemed very keen on my ideas and so I hope he will be able to win favour with the decision makers and I will be granted funding so that the interventions may begin.

Before then however, I have some very overdue commitments. I must complete my Gantt Chart and case study overview map. Once these are done and reviewed, I think smaller steps will be much easier to take.

In the mean time, teaching has started again this week. This is a 7 week commitment to the University and will take more than the alloted 3 hours. But I really do enjoy it. The subject is great, all staff I have worked with on the module have been supportive and interesting, and aside from the odd student who spoils it, they are generally a decent bunch.

I need some sleep now, but my plan is to get all of the time planning documents completed by tomorrow. That will help me to feel that I have achieved a reasonable amount this week.

A Full Contingent?

Well, it turns out that walking around the village in the dark with the dog is a good way to meet potential participants in the youth category. I just bumped into 3 lads who I know have been involved with the particular issue that I would like my first case study to centre around.

They seemed very open to the idea of participating, and jumped at the chance to put their side of the story across. They also mentioned a friend who had been to see the Councillor, so I need to find out more about suitability before xtending the invitation.

Part of me is delighted, part of me is now very worried that all hell may break loose when I put the youths and the older villagers in a room together with the sole purpose of discussing a village shelter for the youths to congregate in.

So with these 3 lads, the lad from our village of the group I met a couple of months ago and possibly another girl who lived in the village, that would make a nice number.

In the other group, I have 2 ladies, a man and his wife and either one of a couple, with possibly a couple more to draw on. I need to keep the balance straight.

Meetings, meetings, meetings

Today has been particularly full of meetings. 4 in fact. And I’m now tired and would like to reflect on the varying success over a glass of red, but I have a bid to write.

So, to record this quite pivotal day first…

Meeting 1 was with my 2nd supervisor. She has very helpfully suggested we meet along with her other supervisee, who only turned up 45 minutes later by chance. It was a clear moment of serendipity, the next 20 minutes were packed with dynamic knowledge sharing and highly productive. He is further than the road than me and has lots of stories to help illuminate the rocky path I am just venturing along. The first 45 minutes was also an incredibly helpful session. My supervisor is so in tune with my life situation, we seem to have a deep understanding of why things are the way they are, and I really value her gentle guidance. I feel supported, cossetted even.

Meeting 2 should have been a little more nerve-wracking. But the Associate Dean hadn’t logged on and wasn’t informed I was coming, so was in the middle of writing up notes, which he continued to do while I sat quietly in his room. Fine, I made more notes. He was incredibly supportive of my request for funding for equipment for my research intervention. Another moment of serendipity – tomorrow at midday is the deadline for applications for funding for community based projects to the university board. I can request up to £2000, which would make a massive difference to my project. Hence the bid writing I am about to do. He assured me that if my bid is not successful, the faculty would look favourably on my attempts to secure funding from other sources and would probably help me.

Meeting 3 was with the Over 50’s group in my village – the destination of my pilot case study. After yet another strange coincidence – realising I knew the invited speaker from Leeds Met (she’s a part time PhD student) who happens to live in my village – I had a brief chance to explain my project to the assembled group and drum up volunteers. I was met with a somewhat unexcited sea of faces, who on the whole left once I had finished. But I do have 6 participants, 1 of whom was already on my list from the Horticultural Show. I think they will be interesting people to work with. And even though it wasn’t the most enjoyable or productive experience, it did make me feel that I was standing up and actually doing something. I did enjoy the other talk though!

Meeting 4 has left me feeling quite down really. On the advice of the Chair of the Parish Councillors, I attended the Council Meeting in the village this evening to request funding for fees for the village hall, or a waiving of fees. Their initial reaction was to just stare at me, that is those that were facing me, half of them had their backs to the public audience. Then they, rather rudely and tersely, stated that it wasn’t their remit and they had to pay the full fees to hire the village hall. I had to ask further questions to get any more information out of them, like who I did need to speak to then. It was bad news, the man in question was very unhelpful when I requested a presence at the annual village horticultural show by a small team from a regional dialect project I’ve been involved with. Still, our local village police officer was their with a colleague. On the way back to the car (I left with them after their bit) we had a giggle about the tumbleweed moment when I asked my question. They were extremely helpful in terms of their knowledge about local youths who may be ideal as project participants. They were very encouraging and supportive, and our officer even volunteered to come along to meetings if I thought her presence would allay any concerns. I was also slipped a note from one of the committee on the way out with a potential lead that I will follow up in the morning. 

So quite a big day. I was hoping I would have had either the equipment or the hall fees sorted by tonight. But more steps forward taken, even if one or two back. And I have to learn to develop a thicker skin I think!