extra extra minty (or, china in china)

One of the real joys of the web this summer has been keeping track of extraminty's flickr stream. Wendy (extraminty) Kewshaw has been visually documenting her stay in China, making china - well, porcelain to be precise.

I was lucky enough to have studied Ceramics in Cardiff with the lovely Wendy in the early 90s and it's just awsome to watch the making of some fantastic pieces with the backdrop of all these images of a rapidly changing China.

It might just be a potter thing, but I am finding it utterly compelling watching the mix of peices in museums and galleries, Wendy's pieces as they go through the various stages of creation and seeing her innovative methods of drawing on clay with stains and petroleum gel and china clay all set to a backdrop of a rapidly changing china. If your bandwidth is up to it, just go there now and see for yourself.

I praise of BB

I love Boing Boing, I think it's one of the most creative and diverse blogs on the net, a happy blend of art, culture and politics. Just in the last couple of days it has brought to my attention a project with an artist in residence working with two doctors at Guys Hospital in London, a $400k hippo dinner service commission, the new Banksy exhibition, crocheted cacti , knitted brains and an excellent lecture by Jason Shultz. It's also closely tied up with the Open Culture movement, EFF and Creative Commons. It's just following that general art tradition of being anti censorship, because we all know from experience there will always be the thorny question of who censors the censors.

I can't think of any other site on the net which would dish me up such a diverse dollop of creativity, and yet this site is banned in work becuse it gets black-listed because it's categorised as being a 'proxy avoidance' site in the new bluecoat content filter.

'Proxy avoidance' is becoming an issues in the US in schools and institutions in part because of what can only be described as a 'moral panic' about social networking. Instead of trying to figure out what is so compelling with sites like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook for teenagers and teach them to how to be safe and responsible global networked citizens, in America, they are just trying to ban access to social networking sites, on pain of withdrawal of federal funding.

The Deletion of Online Preditors Act (DOPA) is making it's way through the legislative process in the US as I write. I hope that this is a bandwagon that the UK doesn't just jump on. Probably the best analysis that I have read on this so far comes from AoC NILTA and can be found here.

I hope that the UK doesn't try and follow the USA's lead and try and through the baby out with the bathwater while blinded by the latest moral panic.

MySpace for things?

A while ago I came across her Draft Craft Manifesto and was impressed enough to pass it on to B who riffed off it in her second cast-on show. For some reason it popped back in my mind a couple of days ago and I googled Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and found a link on her blog to Thinglink. It peeked my interest, but I didn't entirely 'get' it.

Then I found a video on Google and decided to give it a whirl for some of my paintings. So.if you want to know anything about Thing:093UWW, Thing:645BJT, or even Thing:546ZCW (or any other of my registered things, you can because they now all have their own little homepages.

What's the point? Well, until there is a way of searching for 'Things' on Google, not a lot. I can't see myself putting a sticker on the back of the paintings, (I'm more your permanent marker kind of grrl) but the idea of having a product code that refers to searchable data on the internet is pretty cool. I think it would be a good way into getting makers into the idea of being producers and not consumers on the internet. The interface is dead easy, though it is reliant of the user having a flickr account set up first.

That said, I think it would be a good 'gateway' web app. Although I am an enthusiastic advocate of Elgg, it is harder to explain it to people in education who aren't really familiar with the ideas of social networking on the internet. The kids all understand MySpace, but we are busy having a moral panic and blocking that out of educational networks without unpicking what is so useful or appealing about them. The format of Thinglink is: "here is the thing I made, here is some text about the thing I made and here are some tags relating to the thing I made..." its a lot less controversial as a format. But still a good tool to reflect on the making of objects.

Gah, now I keep of IKEA... I can just imagine an exhibition with an internet console and a handy supply of paper dockets and half sized pencils and work, with product codes, it's strangely appealing...

a load of...

... pollocks.

There is nothing like a few weeks ofhelpdesk duty to reduce me to a scribbling wreck.

Blame TED for my new obsession with scribbling.

I discovered the TEDTalks last weekend and listened to a few of them. Very thought provoking, really worth a listen if you get the chance. I am working my way through the the audio files but I noticed that there are a couple on there that are video only. So, it being lunchtime, and having brought in a packed lunch on a pretty grey day, I settled in to watch Ze Frank. Towards the end of his set hse taled about some of the playthings on his website. The scribbler is just great. Go scribble.

Hand and brain candy

While I am on the subject of candy, these hikaru dorodango really took my fancy. I want to make one now. One of the links on the site lead to an article about the shiny mud balls and Professor Kayo who has done much work with small children and balls of mud. The article concludes by saying:

In the field of developmental psychology up to now, play that developed children's imagination and creativity, such as role playing and drawing, was deemed important. But Professor Kayo is searching for whether developmental psychology has overlooked something very important: the experimentation children undertake in everyday activities like eating, getting dressed, and sleeping. He feels that making shiny mud balls is a good way of searching for the essence of children's play. Kayo believes that the answers lie within the hearts of children, and he continues to visit the preschool once a week.

To me, it's just soooo obvious that if you give a child a lump of to play with before they reach the age where they associate 'mud' with 'dirty', they are really going to engage with the material. It's an elemental act of alchemy, base mud becomes something shiny and precious.

I suspect that children don't have the monopoly on the answers for this, potters and other crafters may well have something useful to contribute to the field of developmental psychology. I think we all have an elemental urge to make things. We are all creators. The biblical creation myth says:

"And The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being." (Genesis 2:7)

And while I am not a fan of the bible in general, the logic of 'god creating man in own image = we are all makers' doesn't suck. Maybe making these things is the ultimate 'god game' as you become the creator of worlds....

In the mean time, I found some more detailed instructions on how to make the balls here and here are some more mud balls that their proud owners uploaded to flickr.

I think that some of my weekend may well be devoted to literally 'playing with mud'.

Eye candy

I think there is something magical about early colour photography. I was really very taken with this exhibit over at the Library of Congress. Ok, I know the photo that I chose is probably the least colourful of the bunch, but hey, he worked in a carbon plant so somehow it just appealed.

Also on the eye candy theme, you will find a mixed bag of delights here.

Moving home

Custard seems to have died again so I guess now is as good a time as any to move my site and blog over to my shiny new domain at, www.beyondutility.co.uk. There may be some disruption and broken links in the blog for a little while as I change some links and find the missing pictures. Any problems, let me know.

Thinking outside the barrel

I had thought that bio-diesel or even plain old veg oil might have been our best hope for breaking out of our 'oil addiction' but then having watched this and I am feeling persuaded that ethanol is the direction that we need to be going in. If you have a spare hour, I really would urge you to spend some time watching Vinod Khosla give a lecture on Ethanol at Google. The content more than makes up for the sometimes less than sparkling delivery.

I have been doing a lot of reading up on biofuels lately, the thing that kicked it off was the discovery that Rudolph Diesel's invention of an engine that could run on peanut oil was partly as a result of his belief that for Artisans to survive in the face of steam powered industry, they needed something that would help level the playing field.

In a 1912 speech, Rudolf Diesel said "the use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today, but such oils may become, in the course of time, as important as petroleum and the coal-tar products of the present time." It appeared that he then died in mysterious circumstances shortly afterward... weirdly reminicent of the fate of Agustine le Prince, the man who might have invented moving pictures.

In the few online biographies that I have found about Mr Diesel, I noticed that he has been characterized as a social theorist and a connoisseur of the fine arts and an internationalist , sadly there don't seem to be any of his writings available online in English. That's a pity, there is a bunch of Tesla's writings here, and I found them to give a facinating insight into a really radical thinker who just seemed so out of his time and who has been largely overshadowed by "The Edison Publicity Machine". Of course some of the stuff is pretty barking, but we can't 'hit it out of the park' every time.

Anyway, I am on leave and I have clay waiting to be wedged up in the garage so I will try and annotate a few more of my recently aquired 'energy' tagged del.icio.us bookmarks.

Industrial Revolution meets Digital Revolution.

Steam powered mac. Yep, everyone needs a hobby.

Test tiles and pencil lead.

It has been a long time since I have pottered with any seriousness, but I am now starting to make some test tiles. A couple of months ago, I scored a roll of plastic. I'm not sure what it's called but its that cling-film-on-steroids stuff that is used to attach stuff to pallets. A couple of weeks ago I scored a rather large plaster batt from the art college in Carmarthen.

With these simple tools, I was back in the business of being able to create sizeable clay slabs basically by chucking great gobs of wet clay at the plaster batt, smoothing it down and then covering it up with the plastic.

I wasn't sure what shapes I was going to start making when I went to the garage. I had been playing with the idea of carbon, silicon and either being my base elements, I like that there are 3 of them rather than the traditional 4 or 5. Wait, did I just say 5? I did, I stumbled upon this page that talked about Platonic Solids . I liked the idea so much that I printed off the pdf files of the shapes.

What was I thinking? It had to be the cube... well, the square... well, you know me, it has to be lots of little squares, test tiles I guess, maybe I am constructing the building blocks of a larger piece.

We were in Cumbria last week as B was out audio hunting at Woolfest for her fabulous podcast , and once we were finished looking/recording interviews B and I had an inspirational visit to the pencil museum in Keswick.

Oh how we snickered when we went past it the first time. Fancy having a museum devoted to the humble pencil, that really peaked our curiosity. It was only a matter of time...

Well who knew that the process the Nicholas Jacques Conte devised in 1795, which is in use today basically means that our pencil leads are a mix of graphite and ball clay, fired to 1000 degrees C. Pencil leads are bisque fired! They are ceramic...

Within days of this discovery, I had spoken to the technical department in the pencil factory had agreed to send me a wadge of the unfired graphite/ball clay mix and some graphite to experiment with. The usual slip mix that I use for decoration is a 50/50 ball/china clay mix. The ball clay has a very small roundish particle shape that means it's sticky when wet. The china clay has larger, flatter particles which help to counteract the stickyness of the ball clay. I can't wait to see what properties the addition of graphite gives the slip.

I did a quick google on graphite decorated ceramics and two things of note came up. Firstly it was the pottery of the Gumelnita civilization from about 4000BC. Early balkan (Bulgarian?) ceramics... we all know about my facination with the Balkans don't we? The other thing of note that came up on the search was the potters of Mata Ortiz who re-invented traditional pottery in the 1970s. Apart from the dazzling skill and absolute eye candyness of these potters is that it's a great example of craft being used as a tool of economic development.

Another thing that I was wondering about was the conductive properties of this graphite mix used as slip. I was looking at "electro-grafs" , from the Graffiti Research Lab a while back and thought they were facinating... just thinking...

Some nice free software for Windows.

I have not tried to compile an absolutely extensive list of absolutely everything. I have tried to be selective.
I have used many of these programs on a regular basis, although, some of them I have just found but I do intend to use.
I suppose the bias on this list is towards creative and communications software, because that reflects my own bias.
Many of the programs are open source but by not all of them, quite a few are free for personal use versions of commercial software.

Web Browser

Firefox - Tabbed browsing from the ashes of Mozilla.
Opera - Now free.

Email

Thunderbird - Mail client from the ashes of Mozilla.

RSS Reader

RSS Owl - RSS feed aggregator.

FTP

Filezilla - FTP Client and server.

HTML editor

Nvu - Another program from the ashes of Mozilla.

"LAMP" for Windows

Xampp - Linux, Apache. MySQL, PHP - web development environment.

Telnet/SSH

Putty

Office tools

Open office - Office suite.
Dia - Diagram maker.
Open workbench - Project type program.
Free mind - Mind mapping software.

PDF

Acrobat Reader - Free but bloated from Acrobat.
Foxit Reader - Small, fast and free.
PDF creator (makes PDF's. Open office also allows export as PDFs).

Graphics

Win Gimp - Image editing.
Picasa - Image viewer.
Inkscape - Vector drawing.
Qcad - Computer Aided Design.
Scribus - Desktop Publishing (currently first Beta for Windows).

3d graphics

Blender - Cross platform 3d modeling.
Avimator - Avatar animation editor.

Moving image

Jahshaka - Promising, but not yet very polished.
Democracy - Video catcher and player (developing into an internet TV platform).
Video Lan - DVD player

Audio

Audacity - sound editor
Lame - mp3 codec (needed by Audacity to save projects as mp3s).
Juice - Pod catcher
CDex - Rip your CDs to MP3
Winamp - Many people are very fond of this player.

Misc Utilities

7zip - Like winzip, but free.
RealVNC - By the people who brought you VNC.
Spybot: Search and Destroy - Searches and destroys spyware.
AdAware Personal - Another Spyware search and destroyer.
AVG Free - Free Virus checker.
ClamWin - Free Open Source virus checker.
Kerio Personal Firewall - My free firewall of choice.
Net Stumbler - Find out what's in the ether.
Belarc Advisor - Find out what's on your PC.

More art sites

This one has been hanging around in as a draft for too long. I found the site , onethousand paintings from a link on Digg that pointed to a really cool gizmo that displayed websites as graphs. When I first got there, the paintings were starting around the $90 mark. I think the next day an entry for the onethousand paintings site turned up on boing boing. I checked back to see how the traffic from BB was affecting the prices, they werestarting at around $130. Now as I finally get around to blogging it, I see they are between the $200 - £600 mark. The formula he uses for pricing means that lower numbers are more valuable. But, early buyers get the bargains. So, if you feel the urge for a nice blue number, you had better get in there quick.

Value = 1000 - number.
Initial discount: 90%.
Current discount: 40%.
The discount will decrease by an absolute 10% for every 100 paintings sold.
Min. price: $40.

Great concept, really playing around with the concept of numerical values and, I have to say, flawless internet marketing. Over half of the paintings have now been sold, good on him.

Another interactive art site just came to my attention, I was just trolling through Brenda's podcast comments for cast-on and someone gave the site a mention. It's called Inspire Me Thursday, I think this is a brilliant example of people getting together and using the tools of the web to create communities of interest. Wordpress is (apparently, according to Brenda, who runs a wordpress blog), pretty easy to set up. Flickr is a breeze, especially for newbs. The only problem I have found with flickr, is my inability to tear myself away from it once I get there... gah, just one more tag to search on while I'm here...

Vancouver School

I just noticed today that my favorite Canadian novelist and artist, Douglas Coupland has a new book out. I little bit more browsing turned up this, and this. Nice work, I would have loved to have gone to the installation, I can almost smell the gum, wood and chalk.

Ok, so now a summary of what I am trying to get off the ground in Carmarthenshire.

The Proposal

The aim is to provide creative, dynamic, integrated and innovative approach to ICT Support and Training for education in Carmarthenshire.

The proposal is ambitious, and comprises of three complementary, overlapping strands.

Enquire

The Infrastructure and Technology support portal. The purpose of this is not to replace Amdro but compliment it by providing a “one stop shop” for ICT Support in Schools, by fulfilling both resource (software downloads, hints and tips, information on software and licensing) and service desk functions (helpdesk, procurement, book training or give advice).

Sandbox

A pilot scheme to implement a safe and supported social networking/virtual learning environment (VLE) in which users of the system can create and develop non geographical communities. It is proposed that the system be based on Elgg an open source VLE but also provide opportunities to use and evaluate the pedagogical usefulness of Blogs, Wikis, Forums, Podcasts, Instant Messaging, RSS , Tagging, Social Bookmarking, VOIP and Chat Environments and Social Software in general.

You are here

An artist led project which is aims to provide a creative and meaningful learning context and give experience to learners of utilising a wide range of Web 2.0 tools. Teachers are also learners, and as such also have a range of learning styles and relationships to ICT. This theme echoes the Curriculum Cymreig and borrows from Common Ground’s concept of “Parish mapping”. The primary display space for this project will be an aggregation of multimedia items, drawn from the participant’s blogs and accessible to all users of the sandbox where the project will be hosted. Content creators will be encouraged to make the work available on the web.

“Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds!”
Alexander Graham Bell

I'm instructable!

Over here, look! I finally dug out some old pics of me rolling a slab in college and thought that I might as well have a go at the instructable process of documenting a project. Not bad, though the network slowness meant that I had multiple copies of some of the steps that needed to be weeded out. I wouldn't have minded a spoll chocker either... minor gripes though. I would have felt much more motivated to document my work in CDT when I was in school if I had to put together something like this.

So that last one got me thinking...

If crafts people are considered practicing of their craft. And teaching pedagogy is often referred to as practice, is teaching a craft? I think it shares many aspects of craft. Both are practical skills, not something mastered from a book.

I had considered Craft being analogous to Engineering but my thinking on that is changing. Engineering = practical application of Science and Craft= practical application of Art.

I was never happy with this model though, it seemed pretty clunky, and I have never been able to get behind any real difference between Scientific Enquiry or Artistic Enquiry, The differences of perception between the two are cultural/historical. I think this works better.



I think there is a real danger with ignoring the lessons that we can glean from Craft. A boldness to investigate how a thing is made, to get ones hands dirty, the patience to create, the ability to take pride in a job well done and to accept failure as a part of the process and not to give up because of it.

The Head v Heart dichotomy is historical and cultural (Knowledge v Feeling, Logic v Intuition). Aristotle inclines to see images as coming from one side of the opposition: people make them because of their wish for knowledge. Plato suspects them from coming from the other: people make them to indulge their desires - vain desires, from his point of view. (Julian Bell - What is Painting (1999)Thames and Hudson ISBN 0-500-28101-7).

My art and craft practice has always been almost a by-product of my search for knowledge, I would say that Plato's view holds the upper hand.

I like Tesla's attitude where he credits progress to the artists and rails against rigid teaching methods.

There is another feature which affords us still more satisfaction and enjoyment, and which is of still more universal interest, chiefly because of its bearing upon the welfare of mankind. Gentlemen, there is an influence which is getting strong and stronger day by day, which shows itself more and more in all departments of human activity, and influence most fruitful and beneficial —the influence of the artist. It was a happy day for the mass of humanity when the artist felt the desire of becoming a physician, an electrician, an engineer or mechanician or —a mathematician or a financier; for it was he who wrought all these wonders and grandeur we are witnessing. It was he who abolished that small, pedantic, narrow-grooved school teaching which made of an aspiring student a galley-slave, and he who allowed freedom in the choice of subject of study according to one's pleasure and inclination, and so facilitated development. (Tesla 1897)

TPCK - NGfL - separated at birth?

Thanks to the Narrator for putting me onto this. (I really liked your 18th April 2006 entry BTW. But then I am an aquward cuss who liked to upset the Art/Craft debate in Ceramics by insisting that they were ignoring Ceramics as a Technology)


Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK)

In Shulman’s words, this intersection contains within it, “the most regularly taught topics in one’s subject area, the most useful forms of representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations - in a word, the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others” (Shulman, 1986, p. 9)

Pasted from <http://tpck.pbwiki.com/Pedagogical%20Content%20Knowledge%20(PCK)>

Technological Content Knowledge (TCK)

Teachers need to know not just the subject matter they teach, but also the manner in which the subject matter can be changed by the application of technology.

Pasted from <http://tpck.pbwiki.com/Technological%20Content%20Knowledge%20(TCK)>

Technological Pedagogical Knowledge (TPK)

Pedagogical technology knowledge is knowledge of the existence, components and capabilities of various technologies as they are used in teaching and learning settings, and conversely, knowing how teaching might change as the result of using particular technologies. This might include an understanding that a range of tools exist for a particular task, the ability to choose a tool based on its fitness, strategies for using the tool’s affordances, and knowledge of pedagogical strategies and the ability to apply those strategies for use of technologies.

Pasted from <http://tpck.pbwiki.com/Technological%20Pedagogical%20Knowledge%20(TPK)>

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK)

Technological pedagogical content knowledge is an emergent form of knowledge that goes beyond all three components (content, pedagogy and technology). This knowledge would be different from knowledge of a disciplinary expert, or a technology expert and also from the general pedagogical knowledge shared by teachers across disciplines. TPCK is the basis of good teaching with technology, and requires an understanding of the representation of concepts using technologies; pedagogical techniques that utilize technologies in constructive ways to teach content; knowledge of what makes concepts difficult or easy to learn and how technology can help redress some of the problems students face; knowledge of students’ prior knowledge and theories of epistemology; and how technologies can be utilized to build on existing knowledge and to develop new or strengthen old epistemologies.

…

Thus our model of technology integration in teaching and learning argues that developing good content requires a thoughtful interweaving all three key sources of knowledge — technology, pedagogy and content. The core of our argument is that there is no single technological solution that applies for every teacher, every course, or every view of teaching. Quality teaching requires developing a nuanced understanding of the complex relationships between technology, content and pedagogy, and utilizing this understanding to develop appropriate, context specific strategies and representations. Productive technology integration in teaching needs to consider all three issues not in isolation, but rather in the complex relationships in the system defined by the three key elements.

...

We argue that viewing any of these components in isolation from the others represents a real disservice to good teaching.

Pasted from <http://tpck.pbwiki.com/Technological%20Pedagogical%20Content%20Knowledge%20(TPCK)>

Enquire - Map 3

This third map focusses more on what the 'you are here' art project might include.
I see it as being pretty informal in it's approach, possibly a one day workshop to sow the seeds of confidence, get an idea of everyones baselines skills and attitudes and set up a blog etc. From there on in, I would see the project as being mostly remotley conducted, but with optional half day workshops in schools perhaps on INSET days.

Those are my initial thoughts. Any comments?

Enquire - Map 2

This map is looking more at the functions that Enquire might fulfill.

Again, I am actively soliciting comments here.