Community Media - Interactive World

In all walks of life collaboration is very fashionable: as a practice, a theory, or a goal. But do we ever really think through the dangers or disadvantages of collaboration? If it really works, why does it so often encounter cultures of resistance ? If we are to believe its main exponents and its evangelistic supporters collaboration unlocks creativity; improves inclusion; reduces costs; increases efficiency; delivers more effective and responsive services. It sounds like a win-win scenario. Collaboration is a fashionable way of doing business and it is the rallying cry for governments and public service reformers. Being more networked, connected, co-operative, joined up… the collaboration industry is the dominant mode of discourse in the participatory world of Web 2.0. In a circular motion, new media and social media is built upon - and leads to - more collaboration. Is collaboration sometimes a downward spiral of depreciating values? Or sometimes a virtuous cycle of ...

This is a warm-up exercise. Test your word power! How many words start with "T" and finish with "R" ? (You can find the answers here ) Perhaps a wide vocabulary is one part of intelligence? Intelligence takes many forms: understanding and applying rules, ability to generate patterns, lateral thinking, inter-personal, intra-personal etc. Granted: word skills are certainly not a test of emotional stability or spiritual values or ethical awareness. Use this exercise in pairs — as a group exercise — for the best results. Ideally use this game as a warm-up exercise at the start of a class. You can use a whiteboard, or just practise as an oral/aural activity. It can be time-limited. Try 1, 3, 10 or 15 minutes, and compare results. Actually, it's most effective as a collaborative social media game that might help to bring less frequently used words to the surface. When I posted this verbal mind-game on Facebook it went viral, with l...

I was delighted to read that Maria Balshaw has been appointed as the new director of the UK's most famous art galleries: the Tate . I had the pleasure of working alongside Dr Maria Balshaw at “Nene” or “University College” in the late 1990s, which was  an immensely exciting time to be a Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies.  The undergraduate course was very ambitious in terms of its academic complexity and its diversity of ideas about the relationship between Theory, the Arts, and Society.  As collaborators in an innovative institution we felt liberated to take risks and to embrace creative challenges within the “Combined Honours” degree programme. At the same time, tutors such as Maria played an influential personal and academic support role with students who were sometimes surprised to find that they had been fortunate to have been awarded an opportunity to study for a degree.  As a tutor, Maria inspired students to have the co...

The words 'textus' and 'contextus' in Latin were associated with weaving, plaiting, interlacing, wrought together, interwoven ... Weaving was a complex process that was often the work of women as part of their domestic duties. The most famous weaver in Western classical culture was Odysseus's wife Penelope. To fend off unwanted suitors during her husband's absence, she tells them that she will marry only when she has finished weaving a funeral shroud for her husband's father Laertes. But each night she undoes part of her completed work in order to delay being forced to accept one of the suitors. Her 'cunning' ( metis ) is a form of knowledge, a kind of artifice, and therefore demonstrates the relationship between the craft of the storyteller and the weaving of the narrative cloth. She is similar to and different from the character role of Helen, who also weaves; but in this case the heroic deeds depicted are a representation of her story. T...

A recent article argued that Social Media should be banned for those under 16. Outrage! What are the warning signs that we have been imprisoned by our screens? Is it possible that the addiction to social media could be harming our physical, mental and spiritual world? I would be the first to admit that there are worse activities such as mindlessly TV channel-surfing.But I have noticed the addiction in others ! You all make so many excuses for spending so much time online. For many people this is not a cause for anxiety at all. We are increasingly cyborgian, and any wish to return to the old ways (3-5 years ago) is nothing but a futile, hopeless and romantic nostalgia. Having allocated myself a timetable that now stipulates a progressive increase in my time away from the screen I have noticed an improvement in my general health and sense of well-being. Perhaps the experience of having recovered from cancer last year has led me to rethink the primacy of direct interacti...

  Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding With delicacy of perception and memory, humour and pathos, Carson McCullers spreads before us the three phases of a weekend crisis in the life of a motherless twelve-year-old girl. Within the span of a few hours, the irresistible, hoydenish Frankie passionately plays out her fantasies at her elder brother's wedding. Through a perilous skylight we look into the mind of a child torn between her yearning to belong and the urge to run away. Indra Sinha, Animal's People 'I used to be human once. So I'm told. I don't remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being'.....But now Jaanvar - Animal - walks on all fours, the catastrophic result of what happened on That Night when, thanks to an American chemical company, the Apocalypse visited his slums. He lives a hand-to-mouth existence, with a crazy old nun called Ma Franci; Nisha,...

Scientia imperii decus et tutamen est First, let's interrogate the truth apparently proposed or implied in the titular question. Would it not be more accurate to state: it is believed that academics read lots of books. Is this true? For many undergraduates the notion that their Professor has read more than fifty books secures her a place in the same league as Wittgenstein or Dr Johnson. Far out! Strange! A living geek-book. So, the revered state of being widely read is a relative judgment. But let's grant that academics do 'read' rather a lot; perhaps more than average, perhaps excessively . For teachers in the arts, and in the social sciences, academic books are their primary tools and resources. Text is a living laboratory. Surely they spend every moment of their lives reading . That is to say, they might entertaining the possibility of reading in those great vistas of time the yawn like chasms between teaching, assessing, writing, and generally administerin...