Disqus - Latest Comments for simonbostock

Re: Pebbleroad: Glossarizer

Simon Bostock — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 02:50:52 -0000

I like this a lot - but feels fragile because it kind of depends on Hover working on touch devices. When I tested it on an iPhone I couldn't work out how to make the tooltip disappear after selecting it, for example.

Still, excellent and useful gizmology.

Re: Supercut Genre

Simon Bostock — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 04:11:03 -0000

I utterly heart this comment.

Re: Due Diligence

Simon Bostock — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:26:56 -0000

I agree. Have another ten or so things to add, and something I've been dying to share about expertise/business planning. I should probably also do some real-life testing :-)

Re: The Agile Explorer

Simon Bostock — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:25:44 -0000

Like this. Although compartmentalising and specialising in curiosity might be the end result.

This reminded me of Yubisashi Kakunin - the Japanese work-habit of pointing and checking:
http://www.bfchirpy.com/201...

(Sorry, that's a link to something I wrote a couple of years ago when I knew a WHOLE lot more than I know now.)

The other thing it reminded me of is Observable Work:
http://mcgeesmusings.net/20...

And I suppose that's all tied up with John Seeley Brown's Social Life of Information on his writing on 'studio culture'. That's to say, articulating what you're doing, and why you're doing is likely to encourage a degree of reflection, and spread around the incremental improvements that everybody is making each day.

Anyway, TL:DR = yep, but I'm wary of making somebody an explorergoat.

Re: http://kindofamenace.tumblr.com/post/16015475475

Simon Bostock — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:15:59 -0000

Phylogeny and cladistics is kind of tag-based, I guess. (I didn't come up with this myself but got this from chucking it out as a question on teh Twitter.)

Re: Supercut Genre

Simon Bostock — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 02:46:10 -0000

I agree with you about Supercuts (and would be tempted to stick those GIF 'essay's you find on Tumblr in there too). I think the Supercuts are performing a function roughly analogous to socially-satirical comedy like The Office or even some of the Monty Python sketches (the 'nudge nudge wink wink' scene seems like pure slapstick now but there really were people like that).

I'd say the TV serials are a genre too. I can't think of TV shows before with extended multi-series-spanning story arcs, transmedia elements, end-of-season cliffhangers, massive dramatis personae and the like. (Although I've never watched The Fugitive, so am happy to be wrong.) The DVD box-set is undoubtedly a new form-factor, but the new stuff it allows people to do is genre-ous. This seems no less problematic than any Polonius-like genre list.

But then I'm on the splitter side of the lumper/splitter gestalt shift -I think ALL classifications stick stuff in a Tupperware box, as Susanna would say.

Re: http://digitalcrumble.com/post/10075899120

Simon Bostock — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 14:08:54 -0000

I always end up doing it as a 'text' post, clicking the HTML and substituting the paragraph tags for blockquotes. Tedious, a little, but it does work.

Re: The Digital Native/Immigrant dichotomy.

Simon Bostock — Thu, 12 May 2011 01:47:11 -0000

Wow. What happened to the formatting in the reply? Gah etc

To be absolutely honest, I don't like the phrase 'digital natives' very much either. But I do think that the term, in the way I used it, is massively important.

To be honest, I think both of us are being either naive or disingenuous. Possibly both.

I think you start off with "I don't think it's helpful to unnecessarily highlight differences between people." And the rest follows from that.

I definitely start off with "All I care about is my son who *is* special." And the rest follows from that.

Yep, I know, both of those sentences are at the end of the texts.

But you're a 'hey, we're all in this together guy'. Which is admirable.

And I'm a rampant individualist. In any debate, or issue, I'm going to sympathise with the view that promotes the rights of the individual. And then I'm going to find my evidence to support that.

(Incidentally, I don't see this as 'deterministic' or, even worse, fatalistic.)

It's interesting you see yourself as a more likely 'digital native' candidate than me. And that you see yourself as straddling two worlds.

This is the thing I've most taken away from your piece - nowhere in my writing at all do I mention an age group. But, it's true, I was thinking of young people, albeit sub-consciously. Actually, I was thinking of my son.

But the idea that there may be as much variation within a generation as there is between generations is something I find utterly persuasive.

There was *nothing* in the recent #yestoav vs #notoav thing for me. There was nothing for a 'digital' person. It was outside the Overton Window, beyond the Zone of Legitimate Debate. When I mentioned this to people, with my 'digital' explanation, I was accused (by my father) of being 'naive, unrealistic' and even 'extremist'.

This is the situation I fear with the wholesale rejection of 'digital natives' - not the term (that can go boil its head) but the concept. Like you, I see myself as straddling two worlds - I'm a digital native :-)

Right, off to find a better term and carry on fighting...

Re: The Digital Native/Immigrant dichotomy.

Simon Bostock — Wed, 11 May 2011 17:18:03 -0000

I can see I utterly failed. I don't recognise much of the summary above, to be honest. I've obviously not been clear enough about many things.

But you've also brought in ideas from other people's opinions on 'digital natives'. I did try to be clear - for example, I reject in my pieces a number of the ideas you appear to ascribe to me, including digital = computer, native !=immigrant, Prensky, 'old people don't get it'; all nonsense. And I do try to say all of those things explicitly. - The first two points are of the summary (older people and teenagers interact differently and older people don't get video games) are two ideas that I'm explicitly critical of. My exact words: "... this is all wrong." - You go on to say describe the last three points as 'semi-deterministic'.To say that they are 'semi-deterministic' implies, unless I'm mistaken, that people can choose the language they acquire, the 'mental models' they use to construct schemata and the way that their native language affects how they think? This can't be true. This is no more 'deterministic' than reaching puberty or falling victim to cognitive biases? We all do it. - You say, "I think we have too lofty a view of ... mental models that help us navigate digital environments." But I explicitly say I don't think 'digital native' has anything much to with 'digital environments' (any more than 'iron age natives' have anything to do with the ability to work with actual iron.Again, I'm fairly explicit about this. - You imply I compare 'digital natives' with digital immigrants. Again, I explicitly say this is not useful - I do however compare 'pidgin' and 'creole' speakers as a more helpful comparison. To be honest. though, I'm fully aware of how often my writings (and thoughts - #sadface) are obtuse. And I did rather foolishly attempt to 'reclaim' the, admittedly dead, phrase 'digital natives' rather than define a new term (a fact pointed out on teh twitter by other friends - this was, you're right. always likely to confuse and was doomed from the start).But.Despite all that, and despite not making myself anywhere near clear enough about the differences between what I'm saying and what Prensky is saying (where you use 'non-peer reviewed, I used - again explicitly - 'white paper promoting his consulting business') - there is some real difference between what you think and what I think. And I'm not sure you provide any evidence to counter it, concentrating on making a more general point about other people's formulations on what digital natives are and what this means.Here's the difference:You say, "I don’t think it’s helpful in general to unnecessarily highlight differences between people."I respectfully (and utterly) disagree with your use here of the word 'unnecessarily'. I do think it's helpful to highlight differences between people, especially when those people aren't represented properly.Time after time after time in the responses to 'digital natives' pieces, I see the same tired old response which is roughly: "There are no digital natives because I work with young people and they don't even know basic Excel functions." I honestly don't think I'm being unfair in this characterisation.As I explicitly say in my pieces, I don't think this business of 'digital natives' has much to do with computers at all. What it does have to do with is democracy, geography, spatial-metaphors, marketing, participation, cohesion, nationality - and a whole host of things nobody really understands. (In my head, I label these things as 'weightlessness' - cf http://www.amazon.com/Weigh... - or 'topological' - ie I think the linearity/3D-ness of many world-metaphors are essentially broken)There's a fundamentally different group of people out there, and they're not represented. I love Futurelab. But, really, it's the same old same old - and deals only with educational innovation, in any case.There's a thing called the Overton Window. From Wikipedia:"At any given moment, the “window” includes a range of policies considered to be politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too “extreme” or outside the mainstream to gain or keep public office."Jay Rosen, Professor of Journalism at NYU, talks about a similar thing, except he calls it 'the sphere of legitimate debate' (http://archive.pressthink.o... of these have in common the idea that there is a region of acceptable opinion - and anything outside that region is non grata ie it won't be discussed.This is what I'm trying to fight against. I'm not 'for' the idea of 'digital natives'. But I am utterly, totally, completely against this idea that highlighting differences between people is unnecessary. As I say, there is a danger in using 'digital natives' as a stereotype. But there's also a massive danger in rejecting the idea out of hand.We're not all the same. My view is that, in general, those who are powerful and are happy with the status quo are comfortable with highlighting similarities.I'm not. My children won't be. I want the Overton Window to shift back to a place where I can discuss this productively.All that said, though, I'm going to have to find a better phrase to describe the phenomenon. This one's clearly already taken. :-)

Re: Happy at Work, Happy at Home

Simon Bostock — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 06:54:09 -0000

I think about this one quite a lot.

I love the TED talk where the guy talks about 'Safety Third' – why do we always assume that danger and stress and all that stuff is of prime importance?

Two things:
I worked for a charity with award-winning HR policies. And they were really super cool people and they were generous and everybody was treated super-well. But a few of us were champing at the bit to do 'more' work, on occasion. But we weren't allowed to and, as we suspected, momentum for some really cool ideas just ebbed away.

I have a theory that the kind of people who think it's good to treat people 'well' (and, by this, I mean all the legal stuff about Working Time Directives rather than the just being cool) are also the kind of people who are against the big faceless corporates.

But a lot of the more generous HR policies are only achievable by the really massive organisations. Seems a little contradictory to me.

A little.

Re: Reflecting on 2010, Causes and Effects

Simon Bostock — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 03:23:32 -0000

Once again I'm reminded of why I like the term 'net' than the 'web'.

You can launch yourself on some crazy quest that nobody for miles around you (physically) might get and find friends and allies to join you. Along the tightrope, across the chasm of indifference – he falls!

But it's okay, there's a net!

And he gets back up and starts again. . .

Nice one, Aaron. Your name has become a willing word.

OMG. That was totally like the lamest pun ever.

PS How in the name of all that's holy do you pronounce your Twitter handle?

Re: http://www.minigogue.hypergogue.net/post/2414172598

Simon Bostock — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 04:57:51 -0000

I'm guessing this is one of those things that's worth finding out about people before you start working together. It's one of those key assumptions which will affect everything else.

What to call these assumptions? How do I name to tame?

Re: Creative Ambiguity and Digital Literacy

Simon Bostock — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 04:57:09 -0000

A few thoughts on this:

1. I think it's important to consider collocation, along with denotative/connotative stuff. Even the dry/precise language of academia gets buried into stock phrases/quotes/chunks. Collocation often overrides all other factors.

2. I wonder if "Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing – plus Mourning" also applies to lexis too? I suspect it does, and that this is useful. Neologisms have a social as well as cognitive/descriptive function.

My favourite tool for analysis of neologisms/jargon language games is McLuhan's Tetrad. I've done a write-up here:
http://cleavefast.com/2010/...

But briefly, each word 'Enhances' in that it carves out a new semantic space or more clearly defines an existing one.
Each word 'Reverses' into self-reference over time. Or, as you put it very early in your dissertation days, they 'descend into (an analogue of) solipsism'.
Each new word 'Retrieves' novelty and combinatorial creativity and/or innovation (in thought, which lexis is the basic stuff of).
And each new word 'Obsolesces' a multi-element memeplex into a meme (potentially, at least. New lexis is a function of chunking and cognitive load as much as anything).

The TL:DR of the tetrad is, for me, how will this word *inevitably* end up obscuring as much as it reveals/describes...

3. Finally beginning to get a sense of what you mean by 'creative ambiguity' now. I hadn't quite clocked you were talking about it at the level of lexeme/meme as opposed to chunk/memeplex. Good stuff. I'm now wondering whether, as language games are somewhat inevitable, 'creative ambiguity' is something we should be seeking to (a) introduce or (b) reveal. In this it's very similar to 'gameification', I reckon.

4. This also makes me think of Callois' distinction between ludus and paidia in games. If you're talking about language games, it'd be crazy to ignore the paidia element. Happy to blog about this if it's something new. #gamesisoneofmythingsandidontneedmuchtosetmeoff

Re: Bravo, Amazon, for Kicking Out WikiLeaks

Simon Bostock — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 09:24:05 -0000

Whoops. Not sure what happened to the numbering there.

Re: Bravo, Amazon, for Kicking Out WikiLeaks

Simon Bostock — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 07:54:47 -0000

5. You can't see what public interest is being served here? My guess is that is because you are the kind of person who can quote Bismarck on statecraft, and hang around with people who can quote Bismarck on statecraft. You 'know' how the world works. There are thousands, millions even, who don't.

I find this depressing.

1. You're absolutely correct about Amazon being within their rights. But their actions are inconsistent. Of course, they don't have to use their resources to support 'speech to all comers'. But neither should they be used to suppress. The cloud-vendors would seek to become part of the very infrastructure of the web – infrastructure is similar to a utility and we don't allow our utilities to be used for political ends. Or, at least, we shouldn't. Has Amazon banned any of the newspapers who actually published the data?

2. I'm sure there are people out there who believe 'all information should be free' and believe that we should enter a permanent state of total transparency. I'm not one of them – but I fully support what #wikileaks are doing at the moment. I'm a voter and it's plain from looking at the leaks that I've simply not been able to do my job in recent years. The press haven't provided enough context for the major decisions that have been made. And the secrecy, so vital to diplomacy and international relations, has been abused and debased. Of course, there needs to be secrecy. But once in a while we need transparency so we can all recalibrate and approach the words of our leaders with the healthy skepticism that all in power deserve.

3. The leaks have been released worldwide. It's not necessarily an 'anti-American' thing. In fact, I'd say that America comes out of this tolerably well (with a few notable exceptions – in fact, I'd say the responses to the leaks have revealed a lot more unsavoury details about the US than the leaks themselves. I astounded that the calls by US politicians and media outlets for extra-judicial killings aren't provoking more outrage. For pity's sake, your country is founded on opposition to this!). I imagine that a big reason for putting out US cables is simply because the US has the biggest intelligence networks and gathers the most intelligence.

4. More subtle (meaning a bit of a cop out here ie I'm not sure if I can fully explain), is the huge value of the 'gossip'. In any discussion or debate, there is a centre. If you stray too far from this centre, then you are – logically and parsimoniously – labelled as a fruitcake. I am not at all interested in people who claim the moon landings to be fake, for example. These people are out there on the edge, away from the more rational centre.

"But in the case of many of the big debates on international policy in recent years we have had a debate centred around a phony 'centre'. This is a quote from a (broadly speaking, anti-wikileaks) blog post at The Economist:

So far the interesting material is on Arab states' and America's relationships with Iran. It seems all those fervid background-only reports of Arab states urging America to bomb Iran, which I mistrusted at the time, were true."

If an Economist reporter thought these things to be 'fervid', it's likely that others did too. This means that debate in this area was stifled. Gossip here is good, valuable stuff. It provides vital context. I can't be alone in feeling a sense of vindication that some of my suspicions about the machinations of diplomacy – not discussed at all in mainstream media and therefore not a 'legitimate' matter on the political agenda – have been confirmed.

(And I can't be alone in seeing parallels between this and E2.0?)

Re: What’s the difference between a model and a framework?

Simon Bostock — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 03:52:52 -0000

I'm happier with the idea of a framework as something static.

And a model as something based on a framework and that is dynamic.

So, the framework for a 'map' would be the legend and the topographic codes and the general understanding of how maps work by the general population (ie map literacy).

And the 'model' is the an actual map, how it plays out in its real-life manifestation.

In linguistics, we might talk about grammar as a framework and performativity as the (multiple) model(s).

Summary: framework is fixes and a model is something you can play with.

Re: What’s the difference between a model and a framework?

Simon Bostock — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 03:52:34 -0000

I should add - a framework can, and probably is, produced by a single or 'other' entity. It might be produced by an 'authority', for instance.

A model MUST be co-created and is subject to veto by any participant.

I think this is crucial.

Re: NoddlePod · because learning is social

Simon Bostock — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 16:36:06 -0000

This looks really interesting. And I'd like to subscribe (email?) to updates. I came here via @davidjennings

Here's a couple of my recent thoughts on the business of LMSs (although basically I hate them and think they're a massive con trick :) The first one explains why I think your social approach is the right one.

http://hypergogue.amplify.c...

And this one is just me saying how effortlessly Flickr manage the social stuff - to the extent that you don't even notice some of their most radical stuff (like the 'interestingness' of pictures, for example).

http://hypergogue.amplify.c...

Re: http://www.underpaidgenius.com/post/1679862275

Simon Bostock — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 09:51:37 -0000

I don't get why globalisation is a 'policy'?

I don't doubt for a second that there are self-serving leaders who fail to take into account people's real lives and suffering when they make decisions.

But I don't see – based on the evidence above, at any rate – why these observations make Friedman have 'the heart of a stopwatch'.

I parse the above as 'we in the west are probably going to have to work as hard as people everywhere else in order to achieve the same standard of living one day'.

I don't think he's saying 'fuck the receptionist' but rather 'those people who live in the rest of the world that we haven't given a fuck about for the last few centuries, well now they've decided that's not good enough'.

The only people capable of having a 'policy' in favour of globalisation are the weaker and/or developing economies. We've had de facto globalisation forever.

Maybe Friedman does have the heart of a stopwatch. Maybe he does think ordinary people are lazy. Maybe he is on the side of the top 3%.

But I don't see any evidence of that from the above. All I see is a description which illustrates what we all should have realised a long time ago: we've lived a charmed life.

The giant corporations are milking the globe and it is desperately unfair. But those giant corporations are largely us.

Re: http://www.deusexmachinatio.com/blog/2010/10/6/the-case-against-chekhovs-gun.html

Simon Bostock — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 03:26:21 -0000

I like this. It reminds me of the Missionaria Protectiva in the Dune novels, films, comics, games, whatever.Their job was to travel the galaxy leaving tales of prophecy, Nostradamus-like, which they could exploit in the future.So Paul gets trapped in the desert of Dune and is able to manipulate his potential captors by hinting that his arrival might be prophecy.God, that sounds nerdy.

Re: Visualization of top iPad News apps in Australia

Simon Bostock — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:25:20 -0000

I think this is weird - people are paying for 'aggregators' but not for newspapers and broadcasters, most of whom are (or, at least, should be) aggregators par excellence.
Interesting. But weird - we prefer automation to deliberate automation?

Re: Following up on the need for follow-up

Simon Bostock — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:17:30 -0000

Not snarky - just an observation. I couldn't parse this sentence:
Many readers, for no other reason than that they haven’t gone to journalism school, don’t do the former — and therefore can’t do the latter

Re: Let’s get rid of secondary schools.

Simon Bostock — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:41:04 -0000

You're right about the deskilled. It is a tough one and there's often a kind of 'glass floor' in evidence when people talk about web 2.0/E2.0/World 2.0 - we're decidedly not all 'knowledge workers'.

Bleakest assessment is 'they' all end up on hyperlocal job boards doing odd jobs for the lords of the internet - one thing's for sure-ish, if it's not a face:face service it'll end up outsourced or automated.

More happily, 'they' end up working in Massively Multiplayer Online games.

Happiest, we discover by experimenting with unqualifications and doing away with school that it was the education system causing the deskilling, the dissatisfaction and the disillusion; a new era of literacy 3.0 blossoms. I'm not sure that producing web portfolios based on your interests is either (a) harder for 'them' than school or (b) less informative than an NVQ level 3 in Customer Service.

Re: Is it time to get rid of secondary schools? | dougbelshaw.com/blog

Simon Bostock — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:41:04 -0000

You're right about the deskilled. It is a tough one and there's often a kind of 'glass floor' in evidence when people talk about web 2.0/E2.0/World 2.0 - we're decidedly not all 'knowledge workers'.

Bleakest assessment is 'they' all end up on hyperlocal job boards doing odd jobs for the lords of the internet - one thing's for sure-ish, if it's not a face:face service it'll end up outsourced or automated.

More happily, 'they' end up working in Massively Multiplayer Online games.

Happiest, we discover by experimenting with unqualifications and doing away with school that it was the education system causing the deskilling, the dissatisfaction and the disillusion; a new era of literacy 3.0 blossoms. I'm not sure that producing web portfolios based on your interests is either (a) harder for 'them' than school or (b) less informative than an NVQ level 3 in Customer Service.

Re: Let’s get rid of secondary schools.

Simon Bostock — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:24:10 -0000

Luckily, we don't have to clone him. YouTube will do.