finding fragments

I have been revisiting my past this weekend. I was forced to perform a cull on my 'big box of computer stuff' that lives under the bed. During the process I came across a couple of floppy disks circa 1993. On one desk was unreadable and labeled 'dissertation'(I already new in my heart that I lost the digital copy having tried it out in other PCs and heard the drives go crazy).

The other disk was labeled 'mydis / report'. I am working my way through those files this weekend. A lot of them are corrupt, but there are also a number of intact files, they mostly seem to be notes that never made it into the dissertation. (which I recently dusted off and scanned as a PDF, available here) .The writing is pretty patchy and many of them come to screeching halts or just kind of trail off... but after Graham's recent blog posts about storytelling I found myself re-reading through different eyes.

I will be uploading a few of the fragments to my Wikispace, starting with the tale of two scientists. It's a true tale and one that made me re-evaluate the path my life was taking. It helped me realize that in order to be in any position to comment on or change technology, I really had to engage with it. I do cringe at the earnestness of my angry twentysomething voice, but growing up in Thatcher's Britain I thought I had every reason to be angry. Hothead Paisan had nothing on me...

I have to say that I am *LOVING* my Wikispace. Ok, in some ways it seems a little sad that I am rattling around in a wiki, designed for collaborative working all by myself, but I find that I am using it as a digital equivalent of a notebook, but it has the added advantages of being easily accessible, dead easy to edit and customize, has the facility to export as a HTML site and you can download a zipped backup of the site to your PC at the touch of a button. Fab.

The bonus of the day is that I kind of caught up with Nora O'Baoill (who I had studied with in Cardiff) who was recently awarded The Teaching Award for Special Needs Teacher of the Year in Northern Ireland . I also found a podcast interview with Nora and Joanne Murray about their experiences with ICT and Animation in school in two parts, here and here.