Fun On Friday #88: Inanimate Alice

Part of me is grateful to Neil Winton for directing me to to Inanimate Alice. Another part of me is very, very miffed.

The Passage of Time
Originally uploaded by ToniVC

I'm grateful because it is a fascinating , engaging, immersive, interesting and wonderful piece of work. I'm not sure that it represents "...the future of reading" but I was certainly hooked and keen to "read" on so I could find out what happened.

I'm very miffed though, because it sucked me in so effectively that the preparation for a class that I should have been doing went out the window. Oops! Time management has never been one of my strong points but when I have something as fascinating as this to distract me, there is simply no hope!

So what do you think? Evil distraction that sucks away time or interesting story told in an innovative and striking way?

It's a matter of trust...

I picked this up via a news posting from Computing magazine: Wikipedia considers limiting user access. It seems that they are considering having trusted users that can edit Wikipedia pages straight away but other, newer users, will have to earn their trust as initially their edits will have to wait to be moderated.

Stuckhips
Originally uploaded by Dru!

It seems as though Wikipedia is caught between a rock and a hard place. One of the fundamental ideas of Wikipedia is that it is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit..." and yet, thanks to the actions of a few numpties, they are having to re-consider this most basic of principles.

Perhaps Wikipedia are victims of their own success. They are so well known that they attract the numpties who are more interested in hindrance than help and they are so big, that there are quieter corners where acts of vandalism can sit unnoticed for a while.

Wikipedia's dilema led me to think again about the perenial debate on restricting access to the Internet in schools. Rather than just trying to block everyone from accessing sections of the Internet, would a trusted user system be a better way to go? Teachers would be trusted users and have (more or less) free access to all areas of the Internet. Pupils would earn increasingly trusted status as they get older and as they demonstrate a history of responsible behaviour. Would this satisfy schools' desire (need?) to protect the young people in their care while allowing appropriate use without overly restrictive blocking policies? To be honest, I'm not sure. I think we could end up with a system that is complex, clumsy and not much better than what we have just now. And of course, the untrustworthy will find ways round the system anyway (as they do at the moment!).

Final thoughts. I described the discussion of Internet restrictions in schools as a "perenial debate" but I wonder how wide this debate really is. For example, some recent discussions I've observed are Ewan McIntosh enlisting Barack Obama as an ally in the fight for openness, ("Yes we can!"), a consideration of whether the Internet should be instant or filtered, a fairy story and a wiki considering what education will look like in 2020. I suspect that it is a small minority of teachers, the already Internet/Web 2.0 savvy teachers, that are getting frustrated. Is it an issue that concerns the majority? How widely is it debated and discussed by people in a position to bring about changes to policy and practice at an authority or national level?

As usual, a blog post with more questions than answers.

Fun on Friday #6: I want to tell you a story

Two fun story telling links this week.

The first is a great invention from CogDogBlog - a Five Card Story site. A great idea for getting the creative juices going. The idea is simple, first, choose an image from five randomly presented photographs. After the first image is chosen, another five images are presented and you choose the next image. This is repeated until you have chosen five picture. Then, you write a story inspired by the five images. Simple and fun!

Here's one we wrote during a lecture where the students chose the images and suggested the story as we went along:

Click on the photo to go to the story page. I also had a couple of goes myself: If you want to get ahead... and Generation C.

One final neat feature is, if you tag a Flickr photo with 5cardflickr, it will be added to the pool of photos the five card story site draws from. Excellent!

The second story site was brought to my attention by Mr W. It is the National Novel Writing Month website. Again, a simple idea - write a novel in a month - but a difficult task. I'm not sure I'd cope with writing a novel in a year, never mind a month, but there are some fun ideas to inspire young writers. Like Neil, I especially like the Dare Machine.

So, have some fun writing something... And don't forget to share the results here. :-)