Blob
>the personal blog of david n wallace
[aka Dave the Lifekludger]

On of my ‘Network‘ friends, Nancy White, from Full Circle Associates in the States, has been out here in Australia doing some presentations. Here’s a snippet where my ‘We‘ friend Mike Seyfang and I get a shout-out in her Keynote at the Learning Technologies 2009 Conference held this week in Qld.

It makes me think a lot about what I said regarding Social Isolation over on my Lifekludger blog recently.

Shout-out by Nancy White

Nancy White
Keynote: Me, We and the Network
Learning Technologies 2009 Conference

The power of you – or of me, is mighty. But when and how do we tap into the power of “we” – bounded groups, or networks which flow beyond our personal lines of sight. What practices enable us to utilise the power across these three forms?

Learning Technologies 2009 Conference Podcasts from both days available now at http://bit.ly/2zq7yv

The social web offers a means of engagement that trascends the technology and transforms lives.

Strangely or not, I tend not to see myself as disabled. Maybe that’s why I tend to focus on sharing more about what I’m doing than who I am or what I think about disability specific things – whatever those are.

It’s possibly also why when I refer to people with a disability I use the term people ‘living’ with disability. After all, tha’s what I’m doing. It’s also the focus I put on the possibilities technology can and does offer to enrich that ‘living’.

Besides which, I’m just a practical sort of guy.

I’m not the best at conveying what I feel either about what runs deep and not most elequant expressing what I really believe.

Sure I’ve had my lucid moments on issues I’m passionate about, which you’ll find within the years of posting here, and on my other blog - like Social Isolation, Co-presence and Barriers. Generally though words get in my way. Thankfully others don’t have the same problem.

Just recently I came across a post by Lauredhel titled “On ambient intimacy and assistive devices” that had me saying “yes, yes, yes; that’s what I wanted to say to so many people so many times”.

In part she writes about being social …

The internet is the virtual watercooler (or coffeehouse, or playgroup, or pub) for people like me, isolated due to disability. And I’m fed up with able-bodied folk slamming electronic community as a meaningless half-life. I’m sick of internet use being constructed as a signifier of a person as a pathetic loser worthy of mockery. And I’m over ignorant pundits reviling the rise in electronic community as The End of the World as We Know It, a one-way highway to the inevitable disengaged, apolitical fragmentation of society.

And in an analogy to be physical assistive devices… ”

People who use wheelchairs, for example, use wheelchairs. They get around in them. Wheelchairs are useful, value-neutral objects. People are not “bound” to them; they’re not “condemned” to life in a wheelchair. The use of a wheelchair doesn’t mark a person as either a sinister or pitiable caricature. And above all, people are not synonymous with their wheelchairs. They’re people who use a mobility device, a tool. (emphasis mine)

The internet may be many things, but it is also my social assistive device. And that’s not tragic, or threatening, or worthy of scorn. It just is.”

Do yourself a favour and read the whole thing on her blog “Hoyden About Town”

Thanks Lauredhel. This so underlines why I have felt strongly for nearly 30 years about technology as a tool in general, why I think the connection and openness that a social web enables is important and points to why I keep persisting with the idea that is Lifekludger.

Dave

Tweenbots

Something about this is neat. The act of helping is so ingrained and helping robots reveals something inherent about our humanness. Were these ppl helping to be a part of something? Or because they knew there must be human behind it?

Unorganised crowd sourcing.

Fascinating.

Dave

[via David Weinberger]

Went to my first Tweetup today. Was held at Kappys in Flinders St. Was great meeting some of the Adelaide twitter folk (oh, and @silkcharm, who is an ex-Adelaide girl). Some I already followed and now have some new ones.

Here’s some pics: (more here)

UPDATE: @silkcharm has posted a qik video:

Dave

October is Anxiety and Depression Awareness Month.

October 10 is World Mental Health Day.

Expect to see lots of Blue.

A lot of my Twitter friends are already turning blue and are doing various things, calling it Blueday2008 and
using the hashtag.

I’m never one for jumping on bandwagons for the sake of it. Like these wristbands you see everywhere for instance. But I wear a BeyondBlue wristband, constantly. If you’ve got one, or see one, you might like to take a photo of it and put it on flickr and add it to the group I started there.

I also made a T-shirt for your Second Life Avatar, if you feel so inclined. You can pick one up from here as part of the Blueday2008 event in Second Life.

While there you might like to have a look at/in my sculpture / artwork in there called Ocean of Tears , which, though I started long ago, have been spurred on to complete at, and release on a time like this.

I wrote before in this blog post here why I’d be interested, and in fact why I am doing this stuff.

All this Incandescent Blue, and the iTunes Genius gave me a music list to write this post to.

As long as we are talking about it – What do you do to stay sane?

Peace.

Dave

http://www.beyondblue.org/

Technorati Tags: blueday2008, secondlife

When I caught the news about BT buying Ribbit I took notice. Why?

Because.

Because I know JP enough (podcast) to know it’s got significance for the future.
Because I know the power of voice as the primary means of communication to build relationship.
Because I believe culture creates the technology it needs to fulfill its desires.

So I wandered over to Ribbit and watched the announcement video (very clever guys).

Acquisition video : http://www.ribbit.com/video/ted/ted_jp.swf
Ribbit : http://www.ribbit.com/
BT : http://www.bt.com/

With the Ribbit purchase, it certainly seems the rest of the net seems to be latching on to the idea of ‘web enabled phone calling’ – which of course makes perfect sense. When I mentioned the acquisition to Mike he was quick to draw the comparison to Ebay’s purchase of Skype where maybe Ebay saw Skype as a way to voice-enable transactions that initiate on the auction site (even though that puts transaction before conversation).

However I want to draw a line to somewhere else, based on something I’d read from David Weinberger’s blog a week or so before, that popped immediately into my mind when thinking about the Ribbit news.

David had been lamenting the method of editing audio and wondered why we couldn’t have a method where spoken audio gets converted to text, we edit the text and then the audio gets automatically edited and reassembled according to the edited text.

Editing audio by editing text : http://snipurl.com/editingaudio  [www_hyperorg_com]

With the release of the iPhone, the pervasive success of touch pads on laptops, and the fascination of Microsoft Surface technology and the surface sphere, it seems we are well on the start of the way to touch nirvana.

iPhone : http://www.apple.com/iphone/
Microsoft Surface : http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
Sphere : http://blog.ted.com/2008/07/microsoft_surfa.php
Touch barrier : http://snipurl.com/touchbarrier  [lifekludger_net]

There remains the last bastion of successful input – voice.

Sure, speech recognition has been getting better and better, but not to the point of wide adoption and nowhere near mass market penetration. And certainly not in a way that enables easy, on the fly, sporadic input – and importantly not mobile. Even though some services like Jott are proving popular.

Jott: http://www.jott.com/

But it will come, for the same reason that touch came – because it’s natural, effective and personal and it enhances easer than most things our most basic need for connection.

So just maybe I can see that voice is on the upswing as an input method. And there’s a growing drive to develop voice to text applications. To use our voices for further augmenting our bodies seemingly insatiable need for effective, creative output.

Nothing can replace our human need for connection. And nothing connects like conversation. And for conversation, even in short form, there’s nothing quite like voice.

That’s why when a telco buys a voice software company, with JP in the mix, I take notice.

Because : http://www.itgarage.com/node/736

Dave

Image: ‘Levanta la voz’ – www.flickr.com/photos/62518311@N00/87225176

Technorati Tags: because effect, bt, connection, joho, jott, jp rangaswami, bt, conversation, sphere, surface, touch, voice, weinberger

Back in 2005 after thinking about “Attention, Recognition & Context” I wrote in 2006 that I was “hung up on the concept of context“  and a bit later “On context and openness”

Which lead to the thinking about how I do what I do at Lifekludger, documented in the “Contexts and Clues” section of the About page as — “To get from one context to another takes a Kludge!“….

So just the other week I get a ping from @fang about the book kluge —–

Then I see a tweet from @kanter asking “what is the sweet spot between personal productivity and connectedness?”

My response (below) gets quoted by her in a blog post “What’s the sweet spot between personal productivity and social productivity?” here ……

Which leads me to read Stowe Boyd’s post about “Information Overload, Schmoverload“, and his thoughts on network productivity here ……

Then I talk about it with Mike on our podcast here …..

And so there I am, reading Stowe again, critiquing more mainstream media articles on the so-called ‘curse of multitasking’ and the over emphasis placed on ‘personal’ productivity – “…the war on Flow” here ….

And what do I read? “In the wonderful book, Kluge, Gary Marcus makes a solid case that the human mind is really bad at memory, and that we have developed all sorts of compensating techniques to counter that weakness. Our memories can be demonstrably changed by simple shifts in context ….”

From Context to Context via a connected kludge.

We need connection to others and to other’s thinking if nothing more than a technique to counter our weaknesses – we need a networked life.

And this holds true in any area of application – personal or professional.

That, my networked friends, is life network productivity.

Dave

Technorati Tags: beth kanter, connection, context, fang, information, overload, network productivty, stowe boyd

Cross posted from Lifekludger blog

I read with interest my good mate, Hugo Ortega’s UberTablet blog. Hugo was the very first guest on our Extraordinary Everyday Lives podcast and, outside of my regular colleagues, has been the single biggest supporter of my Lifekludger endeavours, and indeed myself, in a substantial way – providing equipment to try with my mouthstick especially.
So as I read in his latest blog post about how he’s been snowed under with the things he’s been doing to promote all things Tablet in Australia I’m reminded of what Mike keeps telling me and what we’ve been trying to avoid with Lifekludger.

People Don’t Scale – Networks Do.

But it pays to remember I’m talking about people here when I refer to Networks. Maybe it’s better stated:

People Don’t Scale – People Networks Do.

Hugo has found that he’s become a bottle neck – we each only have 24 hours in our day. It’s a lesson we need to heed in this age of exponential growth in available information and rapidly advancing technological growth, if we are to somehow turn it into knowledge and practical outcomes that can benefit and grow us as people enriched by the age we live in rather than enslaved by it.

Just how we grow a network that can scale and how we can do that while keeping the true to the spirit of why the network exists is another matter. It’s an issue that seems to be evolving at the same time as the rest of the technical issues are that are underpinning it. Maybe why we are seeing such attention paid to social networks.

The answer though cannot lie back in the centralised past as centralisation creates bottlenecks. It can’t rest on one point of contact, a single node. The end goal might be node focused but that doesn’t have to mean node centred.
Maybe, like so many other things, the answer lays buried somewhere in the natural world, the small pieces [people] loosely joined [network], the strength of the geo-desic dome, in the triangle of abundant, heterogeneous, creative people – the ecosystem of humanity.

Connection and Openness.

An human ecosystem based on connection and openness [sharing], focused on a node. That’s the Lifekludger vision.

Dave

Reference (from Mike coming out of discussion with JP) :

ABUNDANCE: speaks to the post scarcity world of the internet – where the cost of storage and distribution approach zero, some very different rules kick in. Kinda crucial to the longtail and the jewels therein.

CREATIVITY: coming up with new ways of doing stuff – sometimes just for the pure fun of it. Whether solving a problem or scratching an itch. Either way, leave your past solutions and old habits at the door. You are not a mindless, replaceable unit of production here!

My friend Biff from Naked Yak wrote something ages ago I’ve wanted to reiterate here as it’s very important:

Naked Yak 27/01/08 8:04 AM NakedBiff

Nurturing

The more we share the more we know each other, the more we have in common. In this sense, how we use the technology that is available to us is key – we should use it to share. And we are!

From Boston Now:
“People may make fun of blog or Twitter posts about what someone had for breakfast or how they like a certain video game, but it is all part of how humans build a cooperating society that works. It can’t be rushed, and it can be nurtured, even with simple text messages.”

In the long run, sharing technologies may just help bring about World Peace, by making us more aware of each other.

Not us and them, but we. (kudos to Father Bob)

Dave