It is not my imagination, Eurekster and the swicki universe have both returned. Here it is confirmed in a blog.

I think there could have been more information about this. Maybe it is a high level of PR theory at work, when there is a problem say nothing, just be upbeat about something else.

the last week has made me realise what an excellent thing a Swicki is. I managed to find quite a lot on the wayback machine but from a few years ago. There is nothing from this year yet, normally a reasonable policy but not in an emergency.

So I am now busy with the Swicki Disaster Recovery Procedure, archiving results pages to PDF. More later when this is completed.

I am working on the drupa2008 blog for the next week or so and plan to be there on Tuesday and Wednesday. What strikes me so far is that Apple are not there and Adobe are only just engaged with it. They hace a press release out about the PDF Print Engine but the website is still about Flash, AIR, the Web. Thing is, they could have a point. iTunes and mobile devices, that is the way to go. Meanwhile print is not that soundly based.

It has taken a while for me to come to terms with this. I still think Adobe should do more to explain what is possible with PDF. There could be a file format rewrite in XML but almost nothing is known about this compared to the developer buzz investment around AIR.

Other than trying to link my blogs together when possible, there are a couple of points relating to learning. Education and printing industry have been linked for a few hundred years. Gradually the authority of print is fading away, at least in comparison to other media. There will still be a range of media in use but there is something to consider here. Also there are few models as yet about how the new software affordances can be used. Adobe and others are making things possible but there is no fixed approach as yet. Most of what exists is a form of entertainment so far. It needs to be interpreted for organisations and education.

First YouTube result for "leadership learning organization"



maybe "organisation" would get closer to the UK. To be tested later.

Eurekster is still not working so I can't do a screen shot of the ITC swicki or explore dotcoop. Also none of the Swickis are working. Maybe it has to do with "coming out of beta" as reported here.

I am not alone. Others are complaining. Maybe we should just wait a while. The Swicki idea is excellent if it can go just a bit further.

But then again maybe beta is actually safer. Not sure why.

More browsing to find out what else could be happening in Koln. The Digital Culture site seems a bit dormant. Maybe the demoscene has moved somewhere else.

Collective working and co-operation used to be topics but "evaluation" is also a concern. Univation shows some links to conferences. Not sure how much time there will be but I hope to follow this up later. Studying quality and the PDSA cycle, I think the plan or design phase will be of most interest at the IAS conference. But evaluation is significant also.

The papers from the Networked Learning conference are now online. Chris Jones presents a "social practice" perspective and links this to "Web 2", including a selection from YouTube.



There are many different approaches to what should be available online rather than only at an academic conference or in a journal. I have found different sorts of response to requests to photograph or video. Similar range for cultural performance. Musicians during Sidmouth folk week do not mind video at all. Discussion during Animated Exeter is carefully managed. The Apple store in Exeter may turn up on YouTube but not in an approved manner. Anyway back to conferences and academic content.

The Work Foundation hosted a meeting in September last year looking at Changing Forms of Organisation and the Implications for Leadership & Leadership Development. Will Hutton seemed to me to be suggesting that new styles of leadership are required because organisations have already changed in a knowledge economy. The slides are available as PDF. From the homepage you can find video and mp3 also. Stephen Ackroyd was more critical of what he called a "Network Organisation" but the slides include some evidence of significant changes in the UK economy.

In Exeter I took some photos of the day on the Changing Leadership Agenda and asked permission after the event. As nobody else had taken any this was welcomed and a couple from Flickr have been copied for the official site. There are PDFs for download from the official homepage.

In Lancaster for a day about the MA in Management Learning I found that photography was not given permission as there was a video production complete with an external microphone and boom.



My guess is that links to content would work just as well in devekloping interest in MAML. Lancaster Leadership joined YouTube on May 15th, there I learned something while writing this post. Not many comments yet or video responses. The style may change to be more like a conversation, a strong trend as identified by blogger Jeff Jarvis.

Meanwhile my own low quality guide to a route from the Info21 cafe, past the critique zone and connecting to civilian society, has gathered one comment.

fifthdoor99 wrote:

noise from this evil establishment is quite disruptive when trying to listen at academic events in the rooms right below it

Well, some of us just drop by to enjoy the coffee and the design of the building and the general sense that technology can offer something. Whether it works as a real building is not the point.

Meanwhile my impression is that there is some real basis to claims for the existence of a knowledge economy. YouTube is one example of related changes in open content.

Couple of graphics saved from yesterday. The drupa event will be about print in the context of the internet. I have done a couple of stories for OhmyNews about the change in name for the London College of Communications, Print as was. I don't think I can do another one later this year. Something has changed. I have put a topic on Guardian Talk as well as the drupa2008 blog about the apparent lack of an Apple stand at drupa. That was yesterday but so far nobody has commented that this is incorrect. So I am assuming it is so and that Apple research shows that tunes are the future.




Passing through Brussels on the way is a chance to catch up on what is happening with policy ideas. Previously there was a proposal for eTEN, around the possibilities with PDF. At the moment there is still mystery about MARS, the probable future of PDF as "XML friendly", even more friendly than currently. As Apple and Adobe move on to video and animation, the technology around text and flat documents could become commoditised. "Critique" could include reassembling documents from many sources. This ideas is worth returning to but probably won't meet project criteria.

Co-ops relate to participation. Web browsing shows that the dotcoop promotion seems to be at Co-operatives Europe. I intend to update the ITC swicki to include dotcoop but as it appears Eurekster is offline at the moment. So more on this later.

I have started to travel more as the climate improves. Slightly warmer in May is not too worrying. I have been to Lancaster recently for a meeting about the MA in Management Learning. More on this later. I will be there again in July for the conference on Designing Safety. I am more convinced about data security as a topic. It makes sense as part of the move to a mobile web but mostly as an antidote to other streams of argument. I will get back on topic early in July but meanwhile things come up in various connections. I have been browsing today and found a few images to drop in, remind me of text to include.



This is the logo for the current annual research program at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Lancaster. The conference is on July 10 -12.

There is a summer school about discourse analysis 30 June - 5 July. Hope someone blogs about this. I sometimes think the IAS is more interested in discourse than forms of reality. After three projects it could be time to look at trends. I have yet to find any firm conclusions about the knowledge economy as if some policy is required. Meanwhile in mainland Europe, the Commission is still on the case. Lots of rhetoric of course but worth following.





I am a fan of Psand and Bristol Wireless. They have demonstrated satellite and wifi over a few years. Not sure what will happen over this summer but there is enough of an archive to make a case for how real cultural events can be enhanced. This van is from a set of photos from Extremadura, a region where Open Source is supported. The links are no longer that reliable but here are one, two and three. The EU website has a relevant story. The Riga Document had something to do with the Global Cities project but I cannot remember the detail. The point is that as I remember it there was a discussion about regional identity in terms of aligning with technology, especially open source. Regional identity was the second project, after the knowledge economy and before the new sciences of protection.





My next trip is to the drupa, small "d" but enormous space, the largest print show on the planet. I think that disruption may be obvious this time. As far as I know there is no Apple stand, a bad sign for the future of the printing industry. Maybe everyone is supposed to have a phone with podcasts rather than flat pages. Have you noticed that all the universities on iTunes are in the USA? Swizz or what?

This week has been interesting following the Networked Learning Conference. I tried to follow it through Google Blogsearch, with mixed results. Maybe people cannot both attend a conference in person and maintain a blog at the same time. But some events, tending towards Web2 or San Francisco, seem to be well reported and gain from the blog aspect. The academics studying networks may gradually adopt these methods, unless their studies convince them that the conditions for dialogue have not yet been established in the design phase.

Malene Charlotte Larsen appeared to be "on holiday" but staying nearby. "Greetings from Halkidiki" was the only post but the comments were answered.

Grainne Conole did some full reports on keynotes and some other presentations. I have started to follow her blog and she was back in London by Thursday. And she was in Canada the week before. Having got as far as Halkidiki, remaining "on holiday" and not blogging too often seems quite sensible. I still like the info from the blogs though so am glad someone keeps it going.

I also found a blog on Information Literacy . Sheila Yoshikawa was not at the recent conference but Google found her anyway. She was on Second Life Thursday evening which worked quite well. The PDF download fell over but the url could be copied to paper and then typed in. These glitches are just down to me I expect. For many people Second Life is becoming natural.

I can't find any news on what was said about "heterotopias". This term comes from Foucault and might describe online spaces. I would like to know more about this, such as how to design one. One suggestion was to read Foucault directly and I have found a text about this. He also mentions "heterochronies" - slices in time. Trying this in Google finds the International Festival, somewhere between a "sort of general archive" of a festival theatre in past events and "time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect". In other words while the drawings are very convincing it is not clear from the website if the project is imagined as having already happened or if there will eventually be some actual news.

Anyway, one method will be to attempt to use the word "heterochronies" in this blog and then observe the comments.

From YouTube it appears that the Theatre no longer exists

Google blogsearch has found a blogger direct from the Networked Learning Conference. Grainne Conole has photos of the local views and the keynote speaker. Maybe more will turn up later.

Meanwhile another blogger , Malene Charlotte Larsen, claims to be on a "working holiday" but not attending the conference in person. However she has got a paper in the current Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. I have been round to St Lukes this morning for a quick look and find it is based on research into arto.dk in 2005. So the world of journals is working at normal speed for what it is. This is not meant as a complaint. Good to see some links to current websites.

I have done some notes on events and background for possible stories over the next ten months or so for OhmyNews and this blog.

Available as a Scribd doc and as a Google doc. Scribd may load faster. Let me know if you would like to edit the Google doc.

In brief, UK catching up fast with OhmyNews take on media and technology. But still a few years gap....

The Networked Learning conference has started but there are no photos yet on Flickr. Surely some of them have a moment or two to spare?

This one is Creative Commons so I feel ok about the link. Photo by Adrian Libotean.

I think the Adobe meeting tomorrow for financial analysts may be a defining moment for the Web. My guess is they will concentrate on Flash and AIR and that print and Postscript will not get much attention.

Print media still tend to prefer print. On Guardian Talk (Apr 12) LittleRichardjohn wrote-

The level of internet hysteria on GUT is clear enough. The posters most worried are those who seem to have a definite vested interest in preserving the dominance of print media (and its reliance on hard capitalism) over the new publishing and communications freedoms. The ones who call themselves writers, in fact. The people who should in theory be most in favour of wider freedoms of expression are often most hostile to it in action.

In Education Guardian (published in print and online) Hilary Swain wrote this advice for "anyone wanting to make the most of learning opportunities offered by new technology."

.....lovely as your new laptop is, learn to leave it alone sometimes. Sometimes, you may be able to find better information in a book - or even from a person.

Rather less nuanced is an editorial about local TV in the Western Morning News (not online as far as I know. A news story on a Conservative policy document quotes Jeremy Hunt as pointing out that although barriers are falling rapidly with the arrival of broadband internet TV "it is not going to take off until people can access it through their remote controls." However the Western Morning News editorial is less than impressed.

We welcome the idea that the Conservatives are taking "localism" seriously. But please, Mr Cameron, don't try to impose trashy US-style television on us.

My guess is that actually the Western Morning News is more aware of how effective a combination of broadband and local TV could be than they would like their readers to be.

Not off topic yet, the media pages and the education pages could get swapped over more often as Jeff Jarvis has suggested. He seems to think news stories should just have tags, not be limited to once a fortnight, hat tip to David Weinberger he adds. Which reminds me, the paperback of "Everything is Miscellaneous" is out soon on Amazon USA. Available in the UK by post. Normally the London literary editors do not review paperbacks. but then they did not review the hardback either, in this case.

The Safeliving blog has a graphic of a poster from the National Health Service (NHS) headlined "Public Service Propaganda Posters." So it is the propaganda aspect that is interesting for researchers in this case. The poster informs us that "Hands can transfer germs to every surface you touch" and suggests "Clean your hands as soon as you can."

This is part of a discourse, fair enough, but it may also be true. There could exist such things as germs and it may be good practice to wash hands. I am making this point as it seems the sort of thing that may get lost in this IAS project.

The Safeliving Blog has added a link to the Protection Science Swicki and set the search to start with "anxieties" and "danger" . This explains why these search terms are getting bigger on the word cloud. See recent screenshot.



I have also added ISO27000 and this is getting some attention. The Swicki allows votes on results for each search. So it could get better, in various directions.

I have tried to have a look at Critical Management Studies through the web. To make sense of the Networked Learning Conference it helps to keep up with critique, or at least it offers some clues.

Google finds

http://www.criticalmanagement.org

but this starts with a directory of files. I think it is helpful to record the problems, that is just the quality management approach that I support. And the graphic shows another problem.



Not sure why this should be. I did download reedy.pdf and there has been no disaster so far. But the message is not encouraging and so I think there should be an approach to Google to work out some corrective action.

Patrick Reedy seems to me to be questioning whether there is any request from activists for an academic contribution. Now much of what I work on is not progressive or even political. Quality assurance is obviously a corporate sort of topic. But I am also concerned with web design for general use including social groups. My impression is that the critique take on network learning has not moved much past objecting to the conditions for dialogue, so there is hardly a design phase. What is there about forms of practice? I would like to find some links so if I have missed them, guidance would be welcome.

Meanwhile social networking sites do exist but they seem to have happened in a parallel universe.

Academics seem much more interested in the "dark side", the negative consequences of anything at all. There is now a dedicated conference.



Here is a sample-

Organizations also seem to have a history of and an interest in repressing basic human impulses such as sexuality, carnality or violence whilst institutionalizing them (Foucault 1977; 1990) Organizational processes of normalization create and define deviance and perversion in those activities that cannot effectively be eradicated, and generate disciplinary practices to police this body of behaviour. Is the repressed always subject to return and never completely eliminated or contained? Is organizational crime always with us? Moreover, do exposures of the dark side of organization : 1. indicate mismanagement, loss of managerial power, passivity, neglect of duties and inadequate surveillance, and invite intervention for improved performance; or 2. do they indicate the presence of fundamentally uncontrollable forces that are an inalienable part of the viscerality of human organising?

So is Google a safe environment? I think so, why not? Comments welcome.

And is there a message board somewhere?

The Networked Learning Conference will be in Greece early in May. I am thinking about what might turn up online so have done some Googling.

Wikipedia still has the Technology-Enhanced Learning page much the same. This term seems to be approved by the European Union but I don't know why other words are not used as well. I myself added the category of "educational technology" but other categories may be added later.

The word "heterotopia" has no definition in the Wikipedia, just a clarification that it might relate to either medicine or Foucault. Google turns up with a long piece of text that I will return to. So far I cannot see where this would relate to web design as practice. But maybe there will be some clues somewhere online during May.

Here is some suitable academic language to link into comics-

“Sequential art” or the word “comics” employed as a singular noun are categorical terms used somewhat interchangeably (see, e.g. Eisner, 1985, McCloud, 1993, McCloud, 2000), to describe the medium of expression found in comic books, comic strips, graphic novels, manga (Japanese comics), webcomics (online comics), and other formats.

Googling on OurComixGrid found a blog entry on MySpace that in a slightly disturbing way describes a level of commitment to art as a project and the web as part of this. Some of the blogs on MySpace appear to be just promotion most of the time but this one rings true. No recent updates so hope this means something else is happening.

The blogs listed on the Wikipedia page link to Ginny Salmon on YouTube talking about Second Life. She is Professor of e-learning and learning technology at Leicester. I have added a comment as I think there is learning happening already on Second Life whether or not the academic approach to design has been involved.



There is much to be gained from sharing views, I am looking forward to whatever is made public. But I think in the academic discussion there is sometimes not enough recognition of what happens online anyway.

Two positive developments, one could relate to forms of fiction, more later. The other is that OhmyNews have published my story about the Information Security discussion this week. The UK has enough real problems to form a hard news introduction and I managed to include some of my own opinion-

The survey reports UK interest in the ISO 27000 standards but the most recent survey by ISO showed only 486 certificates in the UK compared to 3,790 in Japan.
The basis of ISO27001, the standard used for certification, is the Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle referenced to Dr Deming though he called it the Shewart cycle and the word "Study" is also widely used in place on "Check". The standard describes how an information security system can be established, operated, reviewed and improved. There is a requirement for system review as well as corrective and preventive action. The controls selected for a specific system are a consequence of the management process.

My impression is that this kind of systems approach may not be well accepted in the UK. There appears to be more interest in leadership as a topic than in how organisations learn to adopt in a new context such as that associated with an increased role for information. The approach of finding senior managers to blame when future problems arise may not be as helpful as looking at procedures and culture more widely.

This is the central bit in what I would like to talk about at the "Safety" conference in Lancaster. The ISO standards can be integrated as management because they each have Plan-Do-Study-Act as a basis. Why it works in Japan ok but less in the UK is still a bit of a mystery but OhmyNews is well placed to cover this. It may take a while.

Leadership is obviously part of the discussion but I still think the "learning organisation" topic was dropped too quickly in the UK. "Networked learning" is also part of this. The security is traded off with access so is never complete. Security awareness can come through forms of learning like anything else.

The other development is that WorldTV now offer service to combine web video as a channel. Victor Keegan wrote about it in the Guardian so this an example of the contribution made by professional print journalists, just to make it clear that bloggers recognise this sometimes.

I have strung together the videos of the Lancaster campus, click here for the Bailrigg channel ,starting at Info21 and ending up at the Spicy Hut. the scenario is a journey from a discussion on some proposal that meets some security and communication criteria intended for a client meeting at the Spicy Hut. Will the intention survive critique along the way? World TV allows new video to be inserted in the sequence. It could be from anywhere, a lot of places look much the same. Could end up as fiction or documentary. Text versions could inlcude comments on this blog or there is a Google doc.

I have done a revised version of the proposal for the Protection conference.

Search results, data security, and integrated management


Secure data is valued as an input for any process so is often within the scope of management concern. Web search can be a source for documents, probably with a wider range than an academic library. The paper considers the possibility that danger can be real.


Standards for data security such as ISO27000 can be audited and reviewed together with other aspects of a management system. Comparisons can be made with studies on quality policies. Academics have concentrated on “quality” as a discourse. Wilmott and Wilkinson1 describe the word as having “no meaning”.


Even if the management procedures described in standards are seen as an imaginary there is still a question as to how organisations learn or otherwise change behaviour over time. As with the latest revision of ISO9000, ISO 27000 refers to the PDCA learning cycle and work by Deming. This can be seen as an approach to design.


One area to concentrate on is security around mobile communications. There is currently a trend for material promoting security software to present social networking as a danger. How to balance this with the benefits of web access will be considered taking an internet cafe as a case study. A PayPal account was compromised during 2007, evidence that danger can be real.


The style of presentation is intended to be as close to a workshop as possible. The paper could be combines with others in a session.

The presentation will conclude by looking at Swickis, search engines using a social approach associated with Wikis. Currently there are two shown on a related blog, one for "learning with ISO 9000", one for sciences of protection.

It is concentrating on data security. I think I will understand enough about 27000 by then. It would still be good if other people could be there. Not sure the blog approach can be extended to a conference presentation where the speaker is missing some basic information but it is worth a try.

I have dropped the reference to film scripts. there is a film evening during the conference but this seems to be a different mode to the papers.

I have been thinking about the Networked Learning Conferences, both from the past and coming up soon. What I remember is that the "critique" approach seemed to question whether e-learning was something to engage with. Some of the discussion seemed not to get past this to an engagement with practice. Not sure if I missed where this could have changed. I have found a link to Chris Grey Against Learning and had another look. Not very polite about the web.

Having put up the Flickr photos from the leadership event ( see previous post ) I have noticed more support for such forms of social networking. In e-learning age Jane Hart writes about a toolbox based on surveys of people in educationa and training and hosted by the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies. Most of this seems to be the sort of software usually mentioned anyway in discussion about the web, including Google Docs and Firefox. My guess is that this has mostly come companies and individuals in groups.

I have searched out some photos from Networked Learning 2004 and started a new set on Flickr. ( I reached the 200 limit so have now invested in the pro offer so will carry on loading more from the backlist indefinitely...) There is a spot for comment on Flickr but also the toolbox mentions voicethread, "a collaborative slideshow tool" for linking in audio. So maybe more links will turn up.

On Flickr there are tags for "networkedlearning" and "networklearning" but not much from the conferences.

One topic will be to sort out a definition for "Technology Enhanced Learning". From a Prolearn email I have found a Wikipedia reference. There is a note as of today that the article is not categorised and should be categorised with others of a similar nature. It will be interesting to see if this changes over the next couple of months.

One of the discussions will be about "The Tyranny of Participation and Collaboration in Networked Learning" including claims about "heterotopian spaces". Google is not very useful in explaining heterotopia. The Wikipedia offers a couple of obviously wrong choices and a link to Foucault. Most of the Google results are for journal articles that require payment.

I have found a description of one from Sage-

Shaping e-Access in the Cybercafé: Networks, Boundaries and Heterotopian Innovation
Sonia Liff

Warwick Business School, Warwick University, Sonia.Liff@Warwick.ac.uk

Fred Steward

Brunel Research in Enterprise, Sustainability and Ethics (BRESE), School of Business and Management, Brunel University, Fred.Stward@brunel.ac.uk

The cybercafé is located as an innovative site of e-access emerging in the 1990s. Accounts of its novelty are reviewed. Its distinctiveness as a site linking the `real' and the `virtual' is theorized in terms of social networks and Foucault's concept of heterotopia. The growth and nature of cybercafés in the UK are investigated using data from a number of surveys. The detailed practices of a sample of cybercafés are examined using data from on-site interviews and observations. It is shown that the properties of a heterotopia are expressed in cybercafés, but to differing degrees explained by contrasting types of boundary-spanning practice. It argued that this analysis has implications for the future management and facilitation of e-access in cybercafés.

Key Words: boundary spanning • cybercafé • e-access • heterotopia • information and communication technology (ICT) policy • innovation • network

Maybe some link will suggest more about this. I may pay out for the download but it could be better value to have a couple of hours web access at Life Bytes.

Comments welcome.

I have posted some photos on Flickr from the conference on leadership that happened in Exeter on Monday. There was only a mention of the theme from the previous event when Will Hutton claimed that the context for organisations has been changed by technology and that leadership has to change to cope with this. See PDF of his presentation. However the idea seemed to be accepted. And the Flickr link has been welcomed. There may be a link from the official site.

More later.

The Byron Report appears to concentrate on other dangers from the web, unsuitable content for children. The presentation in media has so far obscured the interest in digital literacy that was in the research. This report could be a productive basis for discussion as there is an alarming discourse around it as well as real issues.

Things may change between now and the Protection conference. So far there has been almost no press coverage of the issues in the quote below.

"There is a long tradition of media education in UK schools, although it has remained fairly marginal to the mainstream curriculum, particularly in primary schools. Paradoxically, media literacy has not been a significant element of the National Literacy Strategy; and the National Curriculum for Information and Communication Technology currently focuses primarily on technical skills rather than on the evaluation of digital content. By contrast, media educators have a well-established conceptual framework, and a developed set of classroom strategies, that are increasingly being extended to digital media such as computer games and the internet (Buckingham, 2003, 2007; Burn and Durran, 2007). Media education involves understanding the processes by which media are produced; analysing the verbal and visual ‘languages’ they use to create meaning; making judgments about how media represent the world; and understanding how audiences are targeted, and how they respond. These approaches generally involve both critical study and creative production of media."

Annex G: The Impact of the Media on Children and Young People with a particular focus on computer games and the internet (PDF, 305kb)

I have started a topic on Guardian Talk - Media-New Media. Fear and web culture. There are links to education but it seems to start as a media issue, at least as reported.

Graphic from the main report. Could be a works instruction. Good to include mention of anti-virus software.

Information Security

The ISO survey (PDF link) published in 2007 included for the first time a section on ISO/IEC 27001:2005, a management system for information security. My interest has been in ISO 9000 but there is an overlap in how management systems work through documentation and learning. Standards could be relevant for the current research project. The Management School did contribute to the KE project.

In the UK there is now declining interest in ISO9000. However the number of certificates on the planet continues to increase. I wrote a story on this for OhmyNews, mostly about the numbers in China.

Selected numbers from the 2006 survey on ISO/IEC 27001:2005

United Kingdom 486
India 369
Japan 3,790

So although the UK has some base for this, enough not to need to outsource all data management anytime soon, the number of certificates for Japan is striking. Could it be that there is some practical reason for this?

Web search finds a couple of PDF documents that help to understand what the standard is about, both from consultants so look out for rhetoric.

Form for checking readiness from ATSEC

Information Security and ISO27001 – an Introduction from ITgovernance

The form mentions four areas where records may exist-

Nonconformities
Preventative and corrective
Training plans for your employees
Regular reviews of ISMS

The introduction includes reference to the PDCA cycle

The PDCA cycle is the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle that was originated in the 1950s by W. Edwards Deming and which says that that business processes should be treated as though they are in a continuous feedback loop so that managers can identify and change those parts of the process that need improvement.
The process, or an improvement to the process, should first be planned, then implemented and its performance measured, then the measurements should be checked against the planned specification and any deviations or potential improvements identified, and reported to management for a decision about what action to take.

This formulation implies a level of management that is not always involved in the system. Further discussion required on how this might work.

Meanwhile the British Standards Institute (BSI) have published PAS 99, a guide to an integrated management system that could include all the standards for audit and review-

* ISO 9001 Quality
* ISO 14001 Environment
* BS OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety
* ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security
* ISO 22000 Food Safety
* ISO/IEC 20000 IT Service

The IAS view on danger seems to be that the discourse around danger is more interesting, except when this discourse causes danger, which is then regarded as real. That is a bit sweeping but is based on cases from the workshop on documentation etc. The danger of terrorists crossing the Mexico / USA border was seen as low. The danger of death from dehydration was seen as significant. So on the Casa Segura website there is a warning before some guidance on survival in a desert -

We strongly discourage anyone from making the dangerous journey through the Sonoran desert. There is not sufficient water or resources and temperatures are extreme. It will take days of walking in a harsh landscape and it is not worth risking your life!

So this is not an example of a procedure or works instruction following on from a policy. The policy is formally opposed to the procedure. However there is a link to an Australian government site about dehydration. Perhaps this could be considered as objective information, useful for people in an Australian desert.

At the workshop the most enthusiasm for detailed instructions came in the proposals for the "extreme green guerilla" (E.G.G.) community, "a network of amateur self-sustaining people who have shortened their lifespan to sustain the ultimate green lifestyle." The manifesto includes a statement - "We will not engage in consumerism. We must not consume. We must be consumed."



One project is the Animal Messaging Service. "Extreme green guerrillas are against using the Internet or mobile phones for communication, as this method will tie them to big corporation. E.G.G. are also against conventional posting service, as it leaves a great CO2 footprint. E.G.G. send messages internationally by hacking into the animal migration system. In natural sanctuaries environmental protection agencies tag migrating animals with active RFID tags. E.G.G.s hack into these tagged animals to send digital messages internationally.

The E.G.G. project is supported by detailed manuals so is a suitable case study for how detailed instructions can support a manifesto.

This is a blog version of material that may find a version style for a "paper" or at least a workshop or fringe discussion around "sciences of protection".

It may seem way off topic but it eventually clarifies ideas to attempt to present them. The academics in Lancaster deal with different subjects over time but there is some continuity. I may improve my understanding of where they are at as well as of the role of documents in a process.

I still think there is a connection between quality ideas and the work on learning organisations. The "knowledge economy" (KE) was a useful context for this. However, my impression is that it was the rhetoric around the KE that was of interest. Discourse analysis seems to be a theme that continues over different research projects. I have yet to find much about KE from IAS that looks at policy as if a positive contribution was possible. During the conference the after dinner speech was probaly the most effective presentation and the concern for academic freedom resonated with the audience.

Today in the Guardian Education section there is an article by Phil Beadle who claims that computers cannot replace the "professional brilliance" of teachers. My guess is that his take on the KE is shared by many in education.

The further agenda is also economic. If we are working towards a "knowledge economy" in foregrounding ICT use above any other skill, we are promoting an economy in which only one form of knowledge is perceived as viable or useful, and a lesson wasted on a clumsy, two-sentence PowerPoint presentation is of more value than reading a book.

So although I may seem off topic, one aim is to find some way of working with information technology that meets some of the educational objections. "Quality" is one way of describing this. Some of the academic discussion seems not to have got past a set of objections so there is not much contribution to a design stage. Is it surprising that the learning aspect of social networking is best understood by online companies? Another article this week objects to cyberbullying of teachers through student comments on Facebook. My impression is that the Guardian rarely includes a study of how Facebook works or how education could learn from it and similar sites.

To be updated later with some comment on the Networked Learning conference. Will it all be about "the dark side" or will there be anything that could connect with practice?

Film is part of the scope for the research project on safe living. Annette Davison is in the photo, talking about "The Conversation" as part of a presentation on "Ear Defenders : designing film for safe living". There is a readiness to use media from the web or anywhere, not just a print format suitable for journals.

I have found a couple of links from Blinkbox where you can create a one minute sample. This seems a good chance to test this. More argument later if things fit together.

Not much music on this one


www.blinkbox.com

Only some at the end on this


www.blinkbox.com

safetypaper

The workshop last week on documents, mediation and presentation was mostly related to examples of state policy on immigration and terror. It turned out that the chance of being blown up on a flight is less than one in a million so discourse theory is a reasonable way to explain the theatre at airports. Also the number of terrorists arrested so far on the USA / Mexico border is reported as zero.

However I still think that danger could be real. Also that there is something that could be explained as a "knowledge economy" or something like it. And that the word "quality" has a meaning. There is such a thing as rhetoric to support a neo-liberal project, but this is not a way to explain everything.

I realise I am repeating more or less the same points every so often but there is a benefit in testing ideas so trying to connect with academic conferences is worth a try sometimes. I am not sure what a "paper" is, now that the web allows versions to exist at different times. Still, I have managed 300 words more or less on topic.

This blog post can be edited so will have more links later

=================

current version, deadline 15 April

Possible thread- Distributing protection and 'Safe Living'


Search results, documents, and integrated management

Documents can be part of a process with a scope that includes safety. Web search can be a source, probably with a wider range than an academic library. The paper considers the possibility that danger can be real.

Standards for health and safety compete for the attention of senior policy makers. They can be audited and reviewed together with other standards. Comparisons can be made with studies on quality policies. Academics have concentrated on “quality” as a discourse. Wilmott and Wilkinson describe the word as “meaningless”.

Even if the management procedures described in standards are seen as an imaginary there is still a question as to how organisations learn or otherwise change behaviour over time.

One area to concentrate on is security around mobile communications. There is currently a trend for material promoting security software to present social networking as a danger. How to balance this with the benefits of web access will be considered taking an internet cafe as a case study. A PayPal account was compromised during 2007, evidence that danger can be real.

The style of presentation is intended to be as close to a workshop as possible. The paper could be combines with others in a session. Reference will be made to two scripts for film fiction. One deals with the difficulties for practitioners in maintaining a focus on a project while relating to the “critique” concerns of academics. The other covers a security catastrophe intended to focus on responses seen in the context of organisation.

The presentation will conclude by looking at a Swicki, a search engine using a social approach associated with Wikis. It will be claimed that documents can be part of a management process, possibly contributing to safety.

There has been some progress on the "Sciences of Protection" Swicki that I started as a test. "Fears" and "Anxieties" have been added to the buzzcloud following their use in searches. I have also added "danger", a word I used last week at a meeting of the Deming SIG. Apparently the people who work on risk rarely mention the word danger though it has turned up on the website for the workshop later this week. Documentation in itself is seen as potentially dangerous, even if usually there is no danger that could be as interesting as language. Where I am going way off topic may become clearer so check this blog next weekend.

A couple of things fit together from recent reading. Through the Financial Times I have found a research project into Second Life funded by IBM. There is a company website for www.seriosity.com, linked to research by Byron Reeves at Stanford and Thomas Malone at MIT. There is evidence of leadership development through online games, refencing a leadership model developed at MIT. I have now found three PDF files about this and they make a lot of sense.

Then earlier today I caught up with Buzzmachine, the blog from Jeff Jarvis. He mostly writes about media as changing with the web , but occasionally mentions education. He expacts a similar scale of change at some point to what he observes in news organisations. The universities he mentions as having content online already are Stanford and MIT. In the UK there is often mention of research and teaching universities as if there is a need to concentrate on a small number of research brands. As the effect of the web speeds up I am not sure why any research universities would be in the UK in terms of destination sites. It seems to me that the universities where there is most interest in the web are not the same ones that get research funding. Bit sweeping but something to come back to.

I have put a comment on the blog for the New Sciences of Protection project. This is at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Lancaster, where I tried to link quality assurance and learning organisations at a previous conference on the knowledge economy. Not sure where this will go. They seem mostly interested in language, but documents can be a real cause of danger.

By the way, the Knowledge Economy will turn up again quite soon at the Work Foundation. This appears to be a study in government, not rhetoric, so could be a basis for credibility.

Thinking about updating the learn9 website. I don't feel like insisting on definite statements. I think the search engine woreks well for people to find what they want or suits them.

i still think the ISO approach is useful, especially for print organisations but things are more in flux at the moment. Adobe are now promoting Flash and AIR so i think there is anew phase after Postscript and PDF. In some ways I find it hard to adjust to this but also things seem much more fluid that previously. I like Scribd for example and they could do well. The approach is fairly straightforward in using Flash to present documents online, including PDF. There are other products such as share that are still in beta on Adobe labs so I don't know what will happen eventually. Sevice providers that already do some combination of print and web design could go in various directions.

I have sent in a story on Learning Technologies to OhmyNews. More on this when I see how they edit it. It is based mostly on the Adobe move towards Flash so some of the issues will continue on the blog about drupa.

Learning Technologies draft

This is a draft of a story for Ohmynews, probably to be finalised next weekend.

Adobe proposes Flash for learning
e-Skills Maturity Model continues to feature on business radar


Adobe emphasised a view of learning around Flash for video and an animated web at their stand during Learning Technologies, a show at Olympia in London last week. Although the word "Acrobat" is still used to describe a software product there was almost no mention for the Portable Document Format (PDF) widely assumed to be associated with a large proportion of current income. The implication is that Adobe anticipates a web based less on text and learning environments based less on paper. Acceptance for online learning was evidenced by e-Skills UK, featuring case studies linked to a maturity model launched at Learning Technologies last year.

The combination of Captivate and Connect allows for rapid creation of presentations starting from Powerpoint which is assumed to be familiar for most people working on training in organisations. Content is displayed through Flash whether it is video or a form of paper. Collaboration is possible through video conferencing or text chat. Connect Professional has administration features that are not available in the Acrobat Connect offer that is now part of Acrobat. Previously Acrobat was known as software relating to PDF, a format that put on screen a recognisable representation of design for a paper page. In 2005, Adobe appeared to buy Macromedia though the discussions at the time may have suggested some form of merger. Managers from Macromedia continue to be influential in several Adobe business units. When Acrobat 8 was released in 2006 it included a menu choice to launch Connect, formerly known as Breeze when part of Macromedia. Although Adobe claim there is integration between the Flash and PDF formats it is my impression that the Connect approach in Acrobat 8 has almost no relation to the rest of the PDF based part of the software that most people are familiar with. There is no way to save a record of text chat as a PDF though it can be saved as text from which a PDF could be created. There is no way to save a PDF version of slides unless the presenter chooses to offer this.If this sounds confused it is because I am confused. I am stuck on PDF as a normal route so suddenly having Flash all over the place needs some getting used to. -Will 2/3/08 1:15 PM

There were many other signs of support for video as a direction. datmedia showed how videos can be integrated with web pages through any browser. They support many channels from organisations, including the Learning Technologies event. A presentation from last year is on the datmedia website. Techsmith offer Snagit as a way to capture screen sequences as a Flash file and Camtasia Studio for related processes. Flash is assumed to be widely available or at least within the scope of software supported by a training department.

There was some evidence in progress on establishing learning as a business priority. Last year e-Skills UK launched a report - "Towards Maturity" - showing how technology is adapted in organisations. Recently Laura Overton has reported on the e-Skills website about Online Educa Berlin where Sue Todd – President and CEO of corporate University exchange - who presented details of her recent benchmarking activity with her membership organisations around the globe.

Her research shows that businesses are waking up to the value of learning to the bottom line of their business. Sue believes this as potentially a great thing as learning success in the future will require training to be perceived as a core business process supporting business goals in the same way as marketing or manufacturing does.

Case studies from Towards Maturity site

So far I don't see much evidence of "leadership" or senior management as a driver for e-learning. Last year my impression was that technology was introduced by people in training or IT or because people found it useful at home. Senior managers got involved when given detailed training. conversation this year suggests things may be changing. Board approval is getting easier. I am still looking at the case studies.

--------------------------------------

Above is news, comment and quotes can follow. It strikes me that "social networking" is much discussed but academic theory around this is not connected.

-------------------------------------

The question for information professionals working across all types of sectors and organisations is what will the impact be on them and their work is learning 2.0 in all its proliferations does turn out to be something more than marketing hype. One cast-iron reason why it may stay the course is the simple reason that people (and especially younger learners) appear to enjoy the freedom, interconnection, and interactivity that is on offer. A few years ago one of the ways that the internet was fostering learning (especially informal learning and knowledge sharing) was through communities of practice (CoPs). These CoPs are individuals which technology could connect and bring together so that they could share knowledge and improve both individual and organisational performance through sharing of experience in an unstructured way. Just by belonging to the community your experience, knowledge and expertise was assumed and accepted. Learning 2.0 can be seen as the young cousin of CoPs. Learning 2.0 is social network transformed for a learning purpose.

From Information World Review blog, based on Stephen Downes at Learntech Conference

I think the CoP discussion started as an academic way to describe something. It became a practical aim later. Now seen as from the past because I think the academic discussion is not connected with the blogs. I may be wrong but the people who are published in journals seem to be in a parallel world. "Networked Learning" has a critique of the idea of community but I can't find anything recent online for free. There may be something in journals but it is expensive to find out.

Ideas of Community and Implications for Theorising Networked Learning

My impression so far is that "leadership" is not a way to explain how organisations take on e-learning, and "distributed leadership" drifts back to organisation.


Back to News

From the Houston Chronicle

"While Adobe will have new product releases this year (including Photoshop Express, Acrobat 9 and Creative Suite 4 in our view), we are concerned that these won't be strong enough to buck the picture of deteriorating demand," MacMillan said.analyst Ross MacMillan said in a client note. He also cut his price target to $30 from $50.

So what will Acrobat 9 be like? There is almost no publicity for MARS, an XML rewrite of the PDF format. I still think the hard copy aspects of communication have some sort of base. But the Adobe push on Flash and AIR (integrated runtime) mark a significant break away from page based design.

Photos from BETT

This link to Flickr

More on this blog later

BETT story for MyNews India

A revised version will be sent to OhmyNews after the event


Schools Minister suggests parents can solve UK bandwidth problems
BETT chance to compare rich internet applications

Jim Knight, UK Schools Minister, has told The Guardian that parents should now assume responsibility for providing IT resources at home, including web access. "We need to get to a point where in the same way when they start school the expectation is you've [the parent] got to find a school uniform, provide them with something to write with and probably these days a calculator, and in secondary school some sports gear - well, you add to that some IT." The statement came in an interview with Will Woodward who reports that "parents could be required to provide their children with high-speed internet access under plans being drawn up by ministers in partnership with some of the country's leading IT firms."

http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2235303,00.html

Talks continue with companies such as Microsoft, BT, Sky, Virgin and RM to help close the widening achievement gap between pupils from the richest and poorest families. More than one million UK children have no access to a computer at home. The issues will be discussed at next week's BETT show on educational technology at Olympia. Last year Jim Knight announced at BETT a Home Access Taskforce following a study by Intel. Dell and RM on "universal home access".

The implication is that access to the web is now accepted as part of a learning environment. Jim Knight made the case for better web access-
"Obviously you need to make that affordable, you need to make that universal otherwise you just advantage those who can afford it. To some extent that's the case at the moment, where 50% of homes have got IT broadband, but they are hugely powerful educational tools ... we know from the research evidence the difference that information technology can make."

Much educational design has been intended to restrict access to unreliable information and to avoid time wasting through networking. Products at the 2008 BETT will include Autology, based on corporate technology from Autonomy, which is limited to 12,000 websites believed to be "credible". As reported in Personal Computer World, Bloxx will demonstrate how to "block bandwidth-hogging social-networking sites" and also block "proxy servers that allow crafty students to get on the web."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6245899.stm

www.bloxx.com

www.autology.com

http://www.pcw.co.uk/crn/analysis/2206425/safe-bett-innovation-3724662

There has yet to be any official statement in 2008 about the future use of open source software in UK schools. Many people at home are using Firefox and Open Office even if Linux is rare on the desktop. This is one way that web access is easier to afford. The statement from Jim Knight seems still mainly concerned with negotiating for discounts from existing sources, suggesting that "the government could in effect procure millions of new customers for them".

Last year BECTA, an advisory body, suggested delay in accepting Windows Vista and new versions of Office. There was also some support for Open Source. Asked by ZD NET about alternatives to Microsoft, Stephen Lucey said "The majority of functionality is not used in schools' typical use. But if schools make use of the additional functionality in Office 2007 then it is a decision for them".


http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39285734,00.htm

However, in October 2007 BECTA complained about Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading claiming "alleged anti-competitive practices by Microsoft in the schools software marketplace and in relation to Microsoft's approach to document interoperability." The licences available sometimes have the effect that cost differences are not easy to identify when considering choices. "Document Interoperability" is probably a reference to the Open Document Format used in Open Office and supported as an international standard by ISO. However there is no apparent change in approach to open source. "Open source is a separate issue, and schools can make their own decision," said a Becta spokesman to ZD Net.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39290148,00.htm

"This is a mini-step in the right direction, but what Becta is actually doing is keeping Microsoft in front of the market to the exclusion of alternatives," said Mark Taylor of the Open Source Consortium pressure group."They're in danger of looking a bit silly, giving the market a non-recommendation and showing a lack of direction."


There are critics of the BETT event who notice the costs involved for the major stands at Olympia. Graham Brown-Martin on Handheld Learning describes BETT as "an event where the combined investment of all the participating companies, attendees, etc could probably fund the provision of a million learners with a device and connectivity. Or even a couple of new schools." There is some enthusiasm for the event, but then Brown-Martin answers his own question. "Where would we be without the annual pilgrimage to Olympia following the holiday season?" Possibly at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, seen as a bit more "glamorous". The Handheld Learning article continues to make a case that it is consumer electronics driving the home adoption of ICT as the Web is known in education.


http://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/content/view/43/2/

I would certainly agree that the most interesting stands are not always the largest. Open Source software will probably be on the balcony of the smaller hall, somewhere near Open Forum Europe. But BETT is now the only UK computer event that fills most of the space at Olympia. There is now a trend for companies to organise their own events that sometimes appear to be a closed world. BETT may be the only chance in 2008 to compare the new approaches to "Rich Internet Applications" from Adobe and Microsoft. Both are moving away from a web based on text. Video and animation are seen as a way forward. Computerworld has reported that during 2008 Microsoft will compete with Flash through Silverlight.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9053739&pageNumber=2

At BETT 2007 Microsoft announced Grava, for creating content. My impression was that this was a sort of bundle of Expression tools adjusted for education. There has not been much news since that I can find.

http://connect.microsoft.com/Grava/content/content.aspx?ContentID=4256

Adobe are promoting Creative Suite so there will be some familiarity in schools. There may be more emphasis on coding at BETT as the future of applications depends on support from developers.

Moodle and other open source developers will be there. My guess is that a high proportion of developers will be considering open source options. the BECTA concern with "Document Interoperability" is only part of this discussion.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/27/broadband_summit_berr/

Jim Knight is not the only UK government minister concerned about bandwidth. Chris Williams in The Register reported a "next generation broadband summit" hosted by Stephen Timms, Competitiveness Minister at the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR). Knight takes the view that the meeting decided "that they definitely need to start thinking around what to do about the UK's creaking internet infrastructure at some unspecified point in the future (perhaps)." There will be a vision statement and a further meeting later in 2008. Ofcom chief Ed Richards made it clear that the regulator won't be intervening to encourage early investment. He said: "Ofcom's role is to deliver a robust regulatory framework allowing industry to deploy when there is a clear business case for doing so."

This is the same sort of approach that minimises a role for government as such in providing a web environment for learning. My own opinion is that statements such as "the UK will be not too far behind in the knowledge economy by such a such a date" are actually to be welcomed as something relevant might then happen. At least UK parents have been warned about the dangers of the digital divide. They have only themselves to blame.

OhmyNews have published my story on Online Information and the Wikipedia.

More on this later.

At the Online Information show I was looking for a chance to photograph the book - Everything is Miscellaneous. The FT must have had one stand too many as this one was unattended.

More photos at Flickr

There is a post about e-books on the InfoToday blog

I think e-books or access to content online has indeed made it for academics and related readers. More on this later.

I still can't find any London paper based reviews for 'Everything Is Miscellaneous' by David Weinberger. I realise I am repeating myself but I hope to raise this with the publishing panel around lunchtime. I asked the question on the Guardian Books Talk and the explanation so far is that London reviewers don't recognise hardbacks published in New York.

I think they should have a case by case sort of approach. This book in an earlier version was a keynote for this event. Now not much sign of interest in the book. Still on Amazon UK and video of similar content is on Youtube.

There is one photo so far on Flickr tagged onlineinfo2007.

Mine is not turning up. Not sure why.

There is web access in the press office. They have let me in as a blogger. Things are looking up.

Yesterday one of the free seminars close to the exhibition was about how to source business information from BRIC, Brazil India Russia China or emerging markets in general. It was seen as a problem that so much information is not originally in English.

As I understand it, the Wikipedia policy at the moment is to address the problem that not enough languages other than English are well represented. But here on the locally/globally blog it turns out that some people seek out English anyway.

There could still be symbiosis between various forms of structure and approach. The word "symbiosis" keeps turning up. No news yet on the voting for Japanese buzzwords.

More Googling on "Jimmy Wales Wikipedia" finds this in the jamendo blog-

Breaking news: Wikipedia announces Creative Commons compatibility!

Sylvain (Jamendo’s CTO) just got back from a Wikipedia/iCommons party in San Francisco where he taped a very exciting announcement from Jimmy Wales : Creative Commons, Wikimedia and the Free Software Foundation just agreed to make the current Wikipedia license (the GFDL) compatible with Creative Commons (CC BY-SA). As Jimbo puts it, “This is the party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia”.

There is some info from the Online Information conference keynote in the IWR blog.

The InfoToday blog will have more on this later.

Well the bad news is that Easy web access on Kensington High Street is about to become Easy something else. So I have gone back to Earl's Court where I know the deal is good. One Great British Pound then stay as long as you like. No return number though.

Link to Internet Lounge

There is a rumor that either Olympia or Earl's Court is about to become a giant Pizza Express with flats on the top. My vote would be to keep Earl's Court. It seems more like a high street.

Not much yet on Google searching with onlineinfo2007 . Karen Blakeman has a blog but only one post so far.

MyNews India have published my story ahead of Online Information. I was invited to contribute following stories in OhmyNews. I tend to keep text in draft and am often not sure whether to send in something ahead of an event or to wait for more definite information. So I sent the slightly speculative version to MyNews India and probably the eventual version for OhmyNews will be much the same except for the direct quotes. But who can tell? And they may get some other stories from Olympia anyway. Do send them in and don't worry about a variet of points of view. The editors can cope.

outline script bailrigg

This set of short YouTube videos shows the basis of a future video / chat show covering a conversation during a walk from Info21 to the Spicy Hut at Lancaster University. Further explanation later. Production standards to be improved if and when this can be explained to the resource controller.

Info 21 cafe, Lancaster University

Start of a journey to the Spicy Hut. Gather confidence in an IT project, supported through some vision of quality.



Route from Info 21, Lancaster University

Moves towards Alexander Square. Part of a journey to hold on to an IT vision.



Towards George Fox Building, Lancaster

Towards conference centre, and probably a critique of any project from many visiting directions.



Away from George Fox Building, Lancaster

Route returns towards Alexander Square. If it is not raining the tree could be a spot for some reflection.



Towards Management School, Lancaster

Further discussion may just make things more complicated. Look out for shape shifters.



Venue, towards Alexander Square. Lancaster

Another chance for reflection



Alexander Square, bookshop and library

Check out hard copy links



Leaving Alexander Square. Lancaster

From the newsagent in the opposite corner to the library. Another corridor, look out for sudden gusts of wind.



Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster

Could be a place to discuss language, or forms of realism.



Web and coffee at Institute for Advanced Studies

Almost like a proper cyber cafe. You may need a password. Wifi works ok at Info21.



Continuing Education

If there are still issues with the IT project, at least comparison with life long learning may reveal that someone is already doing something similar at home.



Towards the Spicy Hut, Lancaster

Shows the final corner. Can you still meet someone else and explain what the project is about? Don't worry about the food.

OhmyNews has now published my story on the ISO survey. They dropped the words "Quality Management" from the headline but otherwise most of what i sent in has been accepted.

China Leads Continued Growth in ISO 9000
New developments in information security

Possibly last year's version was not as likely to be published as it was less definite.

Continued growth in China use of ISO 9000
Mixed sector pattern in USA and UK

I hope to find response and comment on this story and the survey. I think it is a significant stage when ISO 9000 has momentum outside the UK and the history of BS5750.

ISO publishes survey for 2006.

I have tried to do a story on this for OhmyNews. I am not sure who reads OhmyNews. It could be anyone in English speaking countries but I think it is people near Korea who want to expand on use of English. So the China and Japan aspects of the recent survey could be interesting for them.

I tried before with a story about the 2005 survey. The editors found it too hard to follow for a general audience and I could not work out how to explain it better. For the 2006 survey I have tried to stick more to hard facts and leave the opinions and speculation for later.

There could be several stories from different points of view. In the UK ISO9000 is clearly in decline and there are people who claim this is a good thing. But on a global basis it is still growing and the sector specific standards have a base in at least one major country. To establish how the basic management approach supports learning only requires a few case studies that can be followed.

More later when I hear from the editors. The survey free version itself is a PDF.

OhmyNews have published my story on the LCC Futures Conference. David Penfold spoke about the Semantic Web as well as Web 2.0 and suggested ways to work with both. This is encouraging as to how the Online Information show may go. He chairs a panel discussion about publishing on the final day.

Apple was included in the discussion, mostly around the iTune University though there is no announced plan outside the USA and Canada. Deakin now teaches video editing as a standard part of journalism courses. Not very academic? Not in the newspaper recruitment spec? Maybe but surely they are correct. Check back next year for an update.





Apologies for the clumsy painting on the slide. Playing with the levels helped at first but it soon went adrift.