When I was 11, I had just the most fantastic music teacher. For the next 7 years we worked on all types of music together, one on one, in group classes, in a wind symphonia and also in the school orchestra.
Later on we did music tours with a 70 piece orchestra made up of the senior players from the 4 high schools that he taught at. Wonderful times and just about the best times I had at school.
Since then I have listened to and played all types of music but not as much as I would like to have but it would be fair to say that music still has an important role in my life
The last two weeks have been a bit too busy and so it has be great to hear two quite different takes on music related by two great people.
The first was on National Radio and was wide ranging and engaging. Just the thing for Saturday morning driving around time. Plenty of music history from 1981 and before plus some current music from Dunedin.
Playing Favourites with Graeme Downes
Senior lecturer in contemporary rock music at the University of Otago, and a founding member of The Verlaines (They recorded 120 songs in their careeer) . File Size:13.2MB about 35 mins
Date: (Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:06:00 +1200)
Songs by Simon Comber “Jaws of Life” and “Happened Before” by The Tweaks - (not included in the show as they have been edited out for copyright reasons presumably.) Tono and The Finance Company “Daffodils & a Cashbook.” plus a few others that I missed.
Graeme’s PHD was based on the music of Mahler and his musical journey 30 years on makes for an interesting listen.
Benjamin Zander is clearly a great inspirational teacher on many levels and a Mahler fan.
“A leading interpreter of Mahler and Beethoven, Benjamin Zander is known for his charisma and unyielding energy — and for his brilliant pre-concert talks”.
Just the thing for the end of the week.
Or go here if the video doesn’t play for you. When Ben plays a Chopin piece the audience is invited along as well. You have to see it to get the back story. My late and much loved music teacher would have been very proud.
I always thought he had one of the best jobs in the world but to hear Zander reframe it as a way “to awaken possibility in other people” does make a huge difference and that is exactly what TC did.
There is a major meltdown of customer service expectations taking place over the way the launch of the new 3G capable iPhones are being mis-managed in New Zealand this week.
Go over to iPhone data plan aggregation to read some of the debate (around 50+ comments so far on a site that management might actually read.)
There is also a firestorm over at various other tech and media sites which I don’t read myself but maybe you do.
The background issue is that mobile data is still too expensive for most people to use and even worse it still only runs at close to dial up speed according to the Check your coverage link - in my area here are the results (If it is very slow why does anyone actually care about data on a mobile phone?)
2G/2.5G coverage in your area - Best (Green graph)
“This location has a very strong signal, so you will definitely experience excellent quality for all services. Your mobile data connection will be as fast as a dial-up connection.”
The TV interview being referred to is TV 3 Campbell Live here If you didn’t see it already you should.
While Mark may not have seen the exact plans referred to by John Campbell it is sophistry to imply that the management and marketing teams didn’t research all of the pricing models available and he was well aware that pricing comparisons would be made.
Vodafone then made a judgement call on pricing models and it has backfired in a big way.
A few weeks back much was made of new data plans also at Rods site see 1-a-day/ and apparently these plans simply don’t apply to the iPhone. Plan choices are very restricted and quite inflexible.
To quote Bruce Hoult (Comment by Bruce Hoult at 9:40 am on 9 July 2008)
“Also that “$1 a day” casual data rate Paul Brislen was so happy about a few weeks ago, where everyone in the thread was talking about “that will go well with the iPhone”? It seems the iPhone is the ONLY phone you can’t use those with. Vodafone’s iPhone FAQ clearly says that if you don’t buy a data plan then you can’t use the internet AT ALL, and that the $1 a day is not available. Wtf???”
My conclusion is that if you get an IPhone at present the only reasonable way to use it without major data expense is on the WiFi networks like CafeNet or Tomizone* if they are available in your area.
*Been trying to locate hotspots at Tomizone there is a google map like interface but it’s very clumsy and slow and really hard to use on an almost dead connection anyway.
It would be much easier if I could navigate to a city or even suburb and do my searching at that level.
Speaking of data speeds I have a more fundamental local problem. My existing broadband connection is almost dead.
The obvious culprit is school holidays and the fact that yootoob is way more interesting that most NZ television.
In fact my internet connection has slowed so much that I can even complete the recommended speed test. Try it yourself although that site may have crashed out (won’t work anymore on IE 7)but Firefox 3 is OK.
Have a look at this screen-shot. It is quite typical and this test eventually got timed out.
I won’t say at this point who my ISP is but let’s just say I’m making plans to get service from a different company. It has simply been too hard to upgrade to ADSL2.
I can still get speeds of up to 1mb during the day at up to 3mb at midnight but that is not terribly useful when most of my work involves accessing web based software applications.
If you look closely the test immediately before this one got to a download speed of 1.7mb downstream which is sad but usable.
On a brighter note: If you are one of the 5000 or more people in NZ who already have an iPhone (or an iTouch) for that matter can you please tell me how this blog site looks on your screen.
I’m running a series of filters that are meant to detect iPhone / iTouch and display accordingly.
Hopefully it works and normal internet speeds will be restored soon but switching suppliers is not an easy thing. It seems like a huge opportunity for customer service people to excel and I hope they do.
(TBC in a later instalment.) Hope and trust your day is going better.
Update 6pm: Telecom announces a new 3G broadband device which looks promising on many levels. Maybe number portability could work in teh opposite direction and telecom will get lots of new customers from this.
“Telecom’s 3G mobile broadband network was upgraded with rev a technology last year which means Telecom’s cell sites now have the ability to deliver average download speeds of 800Kbps and 300Kbps upload, resulting in an experience much closer to DSL broadband on customers’ mobile devices.”
Now higher data speeds and capped rates with SMS warnings and a 30 day money back consumer protection all sounds like a breath of fresh air. I never thought I be pleasantly surporsed by a new Telecom product but I am.
TED just released news (June 2008) that there have been more than 50 million downloads of their videos.
Ashley Highfield of the BBC mentions that iPlayer has now had more than 75m video downloads (as at May 2008) so clearly we are moving into a new era of accelerated video and this has major benefits right across the spectrum.
Keep reading for more about both stories.
The Johnny Lee short clip (at #10) is one that everyone should watch. It highlights a surprising twist to a technology product which has much wider benefits and implications for product innovation. (5m40sec)
This is a brilliant example of a product taking a life of its’ own when someone else sees a new market for a new product and takes it there. I’d be guessing Nintendo wish they had though of this one.
Why is this Story Important and Significant?
The Johnny Lee story demonstrates clear examples of what Kevin Kelly (in 1999 book New Rules for the New Economy and still worth reading.) Snips and comments on 4 of these rules follow.
1 - “Embracing the swarm, - competitive advantage belongs to those who embrace decentralized points of control” we can be anywhere on the network and still have an impact.
7 - “From places to spaces, - as place is replaced by multiple interactions with anything, anytime, anywhere (space) the opportunities for intermediaries, middlemen, and mid-sized niches expand greatly.” Think of the multiplier effect that YouTube played on this research project.
9 - “Relationship tech, enhance, amplify, extend, augment, distill, recall, expand and develop relationships of all types.” With this amplification comes the opportunity for new people to tilt the paradigm of existing products and take them into new markets in new and exciting ways.I’d love to see a chart on how many controllers there were before Johnnies invention and now how many they are compared to the number of Nintendo consoles being sold.
10 -”Opportunities before efficiencies, - there is far greater wealth to be had by unleashing the inefficient discovery and creation of new opportunities.”
Sharing new ideas and researching new product innovations in a public way kind of like “research powered by video” goes counter to most of what we have understood about value creation and intellectual property management.
The web has changed everything and that is only going to accelerate if we understand what it is that we are looking at. Best of all, many of these change cycles happen in real time and cross- pollinate at a furious and ever increasing rate.
So What Did Mr Lee Actually Do? (If you haven’t watched the video yet.)
Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. Researcher Johnny Lee became a YouTube star with his demo of Wii Remote hacks — which is almost more interesting than what he actually did - is the speed at which it has been picked up globally.
To understand Johnny Lee, just take a look at his personal Projects page. Aside from his Wii Remote hacks — voted the #1 tech demo of all time by Digg — you can see all the other places his mind has turned: typography, photography, urban renewal … to say nothing of his interesting sideline in Little Great Ideas, like the hypnotic “___ will ___ you.”
So the question is where else will video take us and what else is happening in the kind of television world that most people inhabit?
The Future of Online Video
A discussion panel [Ashley Highfield (first 11.5mins) , Christian Vollman (Germany), Antonio Campo, Dall'Orto] led by Matthew d’Ancona on the future of online video (35mins) Interesting that Ashley notes that BBC programmes are now available on the Nintendo Wii which is seen as a significant connected device now.
And check the numbers - BBC iPlayer has now had 75million downloads. This really is the mainstreaming of quality video online when you factor in TED and the 4663 channels on Miro (Note: Miro includes much of the same content.) YouTube is still a backbone but will be surpassed by other providers who have much better quality content very soon.
Now that broadband is more pervasive there is huge growth in the on-demand audience for quality video.
Ashley passes on some reports and stats that BBC can do as a public broadcaster and it is the trends that are significant on market share . This is great news for more specialist programming and offers a glimpse into the future trends that are shaping growth in other markets.
It will also ultimately have positive funding implications for programme makers looking at online broadcast platforms and potential audience numbers and revenue models.
Media7 in NZ looks to have a great future for example as it leverages outside experts and applies resources from a larger channel to get results way out of proportion to its actual current size. If you have taste-makers and media influencers in the same room anything can happen. When the audience amplifies that broadcast then you’re cooking with gas.
“annual 2-day conference, which began in 2006, and is by invitation only for around 400 of Google’s strategic partners in the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) region. This year’s Zeitgeist was held at The Grove in Hertfordshire, an impressive English estate about 40 km’s North-West of Central London.
Thankfully, it wasn’t a trade conference and Google products weren’t pushed down your throat as you might’ve expected, although there was some obvious tie-ins with certain products like YouTube and of course very strong branding throughout the event. The agenda was somewhat TED-like with a diverse mix of technologists, politicians, scientists and entrepreneurs as speakers.
Seems like Coin had a great time entertainment wise but glossed over the really significant parts but since it was a closed set and I haven’t watched all the video it’s is hard to tell.
Regardless, we are a major online video explosion with video everywhere and getting better all the time.
Enjoy. Now go ahead and get enhancing, amplifying, extending, augmenting, distilling, recalling, expanding and developing all those relationships that will help us all create new value and true 21st century wealth.
I was down at the swimming pool this morning when a new T-shirt caught my eye. “Shift happens” said the shirt. (in a manner of speaking
By serendipitous coincidence I was thinking about the future of education and some recent conversations with educators at a number of schools.
For children and young adults school is the workplace where they spend the most time. As a parent I’m vitally interested in how that time is spent or invested.
One of the stories I particularly liked was about lunch at a particular school. One of the school traditions is that the children can’t serve themselves - they can only serve each other.
That vignette is worth any number of homilies or placards on the wall; because what people actually do is always important.
And at a school how they communicate and encourage students in a particular direction is also of great interest.
As I live in Auckland I was interested to check out a feature article on “The Best Schools” in a recent Metro article.
That feature offers up three summary questions in searching for the best secondary (high) school. These were listed as:
How good are the teachers?
How safe is the school?
Does it offer enough of what your child needs to make the most of their secondary school years?
I particularly liked this masterpiece of understatement at the beginning of the article.
“The major indicators of academic achievement are related to the home. Children with articulate and educated parents and a home culture that values learning are likely to do better than others, wherever they go to school.
What you’re looking for; therefore, is a school whose students do significantly better than others from similar backgrounds. A school that “adds value”.
Predictably the star students featured in the article are all wonderful reflections of their parents and their schools but upon closer review it does seem that analysis is a bit limited in scope.
I would be interested to know a bit more about the bigger picture. How the school is helping to equip students for a world that is transforming and changing at an accelerating rate. As a parent I’d like to know a bit more about educational philosophy which is a bit harder to measure on a chart.
And given that we all live in a techno-savvy world know I would have included a survey of school websites and what they might reveal about the depth of school experiences available.
For a great example of what some 7 year olds can do - have a look at Learning N’ Stuff which gives a fascinating snapshot of actual life at school complete with homework and useful links like Spelling City to make homework even more fun.
To me it is like a glimpse into the future of education in a way that bonds parents, teachers and kids right across the spectrum. Top work CS11!
Also found this paragraph by Maree Conway on Thinking Futures which in turn highlights a relevant video on some of thewider issues. It was in the context of tertiary education but all of the same factors apply right down to preschool.
“Drivers of Change
The future of universities is being influenced by a number of major drivers of change. There are ones we know well: globalisation, demographics, government policy on funding higher education, and the impact of IT developments on learning delivery. There are other drivers that are less well acknowledged.
This is a now well known video on You Tube - Did You Know? or Shift Happens. It demonstrates how things change, and we can’t assume everything will stay the same.”
The presentation comes from Shift Happens who note the universal importance of some of the themes and issues raised so far.
“We believe that the themes of Did You Know? are global in nature and apply to schools and children around the world. We want all children to be successful.
We do not view the growing importance of India and China as negative but rather as additional opportunities for everyone in the world.
We do not mean to gloss over the very real issues that countries such as India and China face, and we recognize that globalization and “flat world” factors have downsides just like other societal shifts.
We prefer, however, to focus on the positive benefits and on doing what we can to help children learn and grow so that they may become successful digital, global citizens.
We’d like your help. Everyone must be involved in the conversation if we are to come up with a system of education for our children that prepares them for the 21st century.”
(Check the suggestions area for some more ideas on discussion and next steps. Like “What implications does this have for our current way of doing things?”)
So what are you thinking about on the topic of educational futures? How important is school anyway and what are we all doing to add value along the way.
A little planning can go a long way - as Dwight Eisenhower once said “Plans are useless; planning is priceless.”
Lately I’ve been to some funerals and also lots of births in the form of kids birthday parties. At both ends of the curve there are a number of recurring questions but today really looking at just two.
One of the best questions ever is “What are you going to do when you grow up?”
I especially like it when its’ a kid asking me the question and I always take that as a compliment. The honest answer is always made up on the spot and and is usually along the lines of I’m still working that out-depending on who is asking.
After nearly 50 years I have a pretty good idea of where to focus but I still adore the exploration and rediscovery of old and new ideas and their application to the present.
I feel very lucky to still have an open end on most of my work/life and to be able to re-imagine the future. It seems really obvious but there is a huge difference between conscious knowledge and intelligence.
Some of this comes with age, learning style and a desire to want to keep learning and growing which sadly we all sometimes neglect. In my world view boxes are for things not people, and so while it is good to be able to see some connections it is always better to be able to really think outside the cube and even go really fractal when you need to.
Forget the box and the cube, everyday is a tesseract of opportunities. If we stay awake, and take some notes like keeping a journal for example, we will continue to discover new and exciting ways and means to develop. The life as a mystery box idea appeals to me and I was interested to hear JJ Abrams talk about this on a TED video which you can view over here.
The other question people always ask in various ways is “What do you do for a Job?”
My usual answer for the past few years has been “whatever I want to do” and yes I do have the experience and skills to do a wide range of activities quite well. However there is always a reality checklist close by especially when the car breaks down or some other bill looms large. So the dream always remains but sometimes often there are work projects we all need to do a) pay for the groceries and b) pay for the dreams.
But I really like the in between time/s when I can work on thinking and planning for a cornucopia of projects and my natural inclination is to gravitate towards the creative end of the spectrum even though much of my “education” was designed to minimize those abilities.
BTW I’ve found a new word to partly describe my general learning style and also explains why I can seemingly link a series of invisible dots - “all this stuff is connected” as Chris Anderson mentions in his 2002 Vision for TED video. Multi disciplinary views of space and time just suit me because I’m poly-chronic.
The polychronic person will use plans but is quite happy to be flexible in their approach to achieve the desired goal. They may flit from project to project as the mood takes them gaining inspiration from one project to utilise on the other.
Flexibility is a useful trait of the polychronic person”.
Finally an answer as to why I’m happy reading 5 books at once as well as listening to and watching lots of videos on apparently unrelated topics. My brain still enjoys the buzz and it knows what a fractal of a fractal is even if it takes me a while to catch up and articulate that stimulus into a series of useful questions for a client.
So the new answer to the perennial “What do you do?” question is that I’m a polychronic creative generalist (and divergent thinking maven) so chances are good that if you have a great project I can help at some level.
“I am not trying to suggest that generalists are perfect. If you are building banking software or you are launching a space shuttle, where well-defined processes are essentially repeated over and over in the building of the software, then specialists may be preferred.
However, in the Web 2.0 world we live in, where new products and APIs are introduced seemingly every other week, specialization loses its allure. Six months of experience on a particular platform might turn a generalist into a de facto specialist.
At the same time, a generalist brings a variety of hard and soft skills to the task at hand. They often have the ability to quickly assimilate a new technology or skill, and may be able to quickly accomplish tasks in unfamiliar situations. And, from what I’ve seen in the past few years working with the Web, everything is an unfamiliar situation.” (see larryborsato.com)
Snap - dude…I am also an entreprenerial marketer, product developer, planning consultant, researcher and more. On any given day I can be writing a marketing plan, developing a website to go with the brand and talking with CEO’s about their industry strategies and / or enterprise level software to go with with their orders as well.
Equally I’m at home brainstorming with other mavens and turning the metaphorical map upside down with a sprinkle of physics, architecture and whatever other discipline I may be absorbing at that time. Lifelong learning is not just a bright idea, it’s a way of life.
Somehow it all works out because the challenges along the way help cross pollinate the answers on other projects present and future.
There is a wonderful story that Jim Collins tells about writing down observations on himself in a little notebook “about the bug called Jim.” You can listen to the bio story over here (11mins.) (Hear Jim talk about his path to becoming a self-employed professor.* )
His description of an entrepreneur as someone who is “congenetically coded with the defect that they can’t work for other people” …entrepreneurship is a life idea…starting with a blank canvas.. carving your own path and figuring out how to do that in a unique way…”
And overall the joy of the question is something that keeps me revisiting his website and books. I’ve also learned over many years that if I listen to audio that somehow works better for me personally -which is why I’ll sometimes listen to TED videos in the background while I’m working on something else entirely.
Finally part of the reason for this post is that I have been making the equivalent of mix tapes by combining and mashing /recombining some of the 80 video clips from my “creative commons” TED collection.
Despite ranging across the full spectrum of subjects from physics, architecture, design, neurology, photography, dance, business, technology, maths, education and so on - it is not differences that I see, rather - it is the connections between all those subjects that matter most.
I’d much rather they ask the first one about what am I going to do when I grow up—but then you’d expect a creative generalist to have that kind of an answer.
“creative generalist”
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