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.
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.
In the last post I mentioned that the TED prize broadcasts were going to be live so that anyone could see the video as it happened from the TED conference.
There were 3 sessions plus a musical performance. It was great to get an idea of the conference in real time even though one of the presentations in my view wasn’t up to scratch.*
In my opinion the most inspiring TED prize presentation was by Dave Eggers.
Dave has found a very practical and inspiring way of improving educational outcomes and helping teachers and parents with the Valencia 826 project which has now morphed into a national and international project now called Once upon a School.
A few days ago the video from that presentation was released and you can now view and download it.
The genius of this idea is that it provides a new model for adults to get involved in some very practical ways to support teachers, parents and of course - the kids themselves.
Ironically the reason it has taken so long to finish this post is that my local school has a musical fund raising event called the Little Day Out and we have used a blog based system to provide a full website for the event.
Consequently in the past 6 weeks there has been the equivalent of 30 content posts from all the different teams involved so it’s been a bit busy! If you are in Auckland, NZ on April 5th feel free to come along - kids under 12 are free and full details are on the LDO website.
Working together with lots of volunteers is exciting and it is that same combination of focus and community passion that drives the Once Upon a School idea.
Dave tells a great story about how Valencia 826 came about, why they had to sell pirate supplies for the working buccaneer and how this project has become the model for six other innovative mentoring / tutoring centres.
There are now 1400 tutors in SF and Valencia 826 is now working with multiple schools to the point where they have been given classrooms to use directly for the programme.
“Dave Eggers’ first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was a memoir about becoming the official guardian of his 8-year-old brother at the age of 22. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; the New York Times called him a staggeringly talented new writer.
Since then Dave has written a number of other books, including You Shall Know Our Velocity!, followed by a collection of short stories, How We Are Hungry, and his latest book, What Is the What, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award…..
Much more recently he co-wrote, with Spike Jonze, the film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.”
Dave Eggers - Author, philanthropist and literary entrepreneur “When we think about kids and education, we have to get back to the basic undeniable that kids are individuals, they learn in a thousand ways, and there are undeniable steps to greater education for all: better salaries for teachers, smaller class sizes, and more one-on-one attention.”
and here is a quick history of some of the flow on effects of the project from their website.
We started with after-school tutoring as the foundation of 826 Valencia in San Francisco.
But the volunteer corps grew so quickly and broadly — within a year we had 1100 tutors, from hundreds of occupations — that we were able to dream of many other ways to work with students, schools, teachers, and parents.
With an abundance of support, we were able to do much more than we intended.
We were able to begin hosting daily field trips where students learned story writing, editing and bookmaking. We were able to send tutors into schools all over the city at a teacher’s behest. We were able to host nightly workshops, open to all, taught by professionals.
We were able to give four yearly college scholarships and a monthly teacher award (attached to a monetary grant). We were able to publish paperback and hardcover books of student work, in addition to producing dozens of newspapers, chapbooks, student films, plays, radio shows and websites.
The essence of the program is that it’s like school, but it’s not school.
The students come to 826 because it’s fun, it’s warm, it’s full of people who care — but who don’t HAVE to care. That is, the average students knows his teacher has to help with his schoolwork, and he knows his parents have to help.
But there’s something very new and transformative about meeting a member of the community — a professional journalist, a radio disc jockey, a graduate student, an advertising copywriter, a software developer, a retired lawyer — and have that person give them 2-3 hours of undivided attention.
Almost without exception, student achievement and understanding leaps when they are given this concentrated one-on-one attention. Teachers and parents love the help, and the students get to ask a hundred questions until they truly understand a concept.”
The reason that the first store sells pirate supplies is that the zoning required some form of retail activity and by fortuitous chance they decided on pirate supplies almost as a joke.
At the beginning this confused a few people and parents weren’t so keen on the idea but incredibly that part of the store now pays the rent while the tutoring centre does the real work.
“At San Francisco’s only independent pirate supply store, we offer a variety of goods, including lard, flags, eye patches, mops, glass eyes and the like.
All proceeds from the store go toward the writing center resting directly behind it.”
For those who want to know more about the TED conference David Cowan has posted an extensive series of very entertaining posts for each day of the conference. I have include the list below along with a few of his comments. Thanks David - almost as good as being there.
“Particle physicist Garrett Lisi closed the session. Garrett is an avid surfer who lives and works in a van on the beaches of Maui. He compares physics experiments to startups, since they hold great promise but they usually don’t work.
The connection to beauty is that Lisi is pursuing the grand unified theory of physics by advocating a mathematical model of the universe that isn’t proven, but it’s so elegant and beautiful that physicists like Lisi believe that it’s most probably correct. (As Dr. Suess wrote about Horton’s egg, “It should be, it should be, it should be like that.”) “
“Dave Eggers, author of several non-conventional books, the best of which is (in my humble opinion, but apparently not his) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. TED recognized Eggers for his campaign to build several inner city tutoring centers staffed by writers.”
David is also surprised by one of the TED prize winners. Karen Armstrong. I was too. I think she should give the prize money back. Her presentation lacked clarity and real vision in my opinion.
An example is “I then got to hear novelist Amy Tan after all. I wasn’t expecting much, but somehow she still disappointed. As far as I can tell, the entire point of her talk was “How did I come to be such a creative genius?” The possibilities seem to include “God’s will, synchrony, or mysterious forces.” And finally her Big Question: “Did someone intend for me to be this way?” My big question: Who Has Time For This?”
All of these posts by David Cowan are great examples of how blogging can get to the heart of an event as it is filtered by an engaged participant.
Note: * The TED presentation by Karen Armstrong was unconvincing to me. Granted - the topic is a difficult one and the intention is good but I would have given the prize to someone else like Majora Carter who is unquestionably outstanding by way of contrast.
The latest TED conference starts this week and runs from 27th of Feb to Sat March1. This time presenters range from Craig Venter, through Bob Geldof , Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Isaac Mizrahi to economist Paul Collier and many, many others.
On the Friday night for example there is a debate chaired by Matt Frei of BBC on “How True is Your World View?“, which is both dissecting the media and being broadcast later by the BBC as part of an extended debate.
I’d love to be there myself even though the tickets are almost impossible to get, they cost around $US 6k and then you have to get from wherever you are to Monterey (& Aspen) so there are travel and accommodation expenses also. Luckily I do know a couple of the people who are going and we hope to hear back from them in due course.
I happen to think that most of the discussions and presentations are almost priceless and I know this because like many thousand others I have been busy downloading the videos from the TED site for the past year or more.
I have now watched something like 60 x 18minute videos. Some are much longer like that early Bono one (Who was going to tell him to stop!) They are almost always fascinating and would be keynotes at a wide range of conferences in a host of disciplines.
Who are we?
What is our place in the universe?
What is life?
Is beauty truth?
Will evil prevail?
How can we change the world?
How do we create?
What’s out there?
What will tomorrow bring?
What stirs us?
How dare we be optimistic?
And the point?
As a creative generalist myself …I find the TED sessions wonderful to watch on video. I keep around 40 TED videos in various formats.
For a while I loaded them as QuickTime movies on CD’s for friends, as you are allowed to do under the Creative Commons license but from experience it much better to convert and save them onto DVD’s as not everyone is that savvy with managing video files (unless they are Mac owners.) And watching them on a TV is also much better!
“5. If you’re a teacher, consider incorporating TEDTalks into your classes. They are distributed under a Creative Commons license, and are freely available for such use, so long as you credit the source and do not distort the speakers’ intended meaning.”
For this conference there is also an invitation to a live session from TED organisers see below.
“First and foremost, we are opening up one complete session of TED free to the world, streamed live over the web. It’s the dramatic session tomorrow evening when three remarkable individuals each unveil their TED Prize wish. (”One wish to change the world. No restrictions. Think big. Be creative.”)
I invite you to join a global audience as Dave Eggers, Neil Turok and Karen Armstrong share their inspiring visions, followed by the uplifting music of Vusi Mahlasela.
You can see the live TED conference video feed here on Thursday, starting at 5.15pm US Pacific Time and lasting a couple of hours. You’ll probably need a broadband connection to see the video properly. There’s a button below the video to select a full-screen view.”
After checking my World Time clock I can see that @ 5:pm (15mins before) is 2pm Friday 29th for NZ and other locations are as shown below.
U.S - California
Thu 28/02/2008
5:00 p.m.
Australia - NSW
Fri 29/02/2008
12:00 p.m.*
New Zealand
Fri 29/02/2008
2:00 p.m.*
United Kingdom
Fri 29/02/2008
1:00 a.m.
New York
Thu 28/02/2008
8:00 p.m.
Enjoy. If you are going to TED and want to report back on what you liked - please let us know your impressions as we’d love to post any insights here.
Those 6 trends are (Each gets a paragraph or more.)
1. Pervasive connectivity
2. Immersive experience
3. New interfaces
4. Attention profiling
5. DIY apps
6. Social revolution)
However the one I was most interested in was:-4. Attention profiling
“We are moving to a world of infinite content. The proliferation of blogs, online publications, podcasts, and videos means we are swamped with information.
The first phase of the response has been user filtered content or collaborative filtering on sites such as Last.FM and scouta.com, giving us personalized recommendations.
The next phase will be to develop detailed profiles of our interests and behaviors across different categories of content, so that we can access or be presented with content in a way that matches our available attention relative to the relevance and interest of the content.
The two most promising initiatives in this space - Particls and illumio - have both been launched in the last couple of months.
We can expect it to become a completely seamless process to find or be given what we want from an infinite landscape of content.”
In the life-cycle and growth of any community we see the same phases and variations. For people to make sense of something so large expect them to use filter and tools so that the signal is stronger than than the noise coming from the massed group.
In many ways online behavior is not so different to offline - it is just more exaggerated, mobile and volatile because it can be and because of amplification of the core messages and other content.
I have a very large home library of books that I use like diving boards to explore ideas with. One of the things I like to do is to revisit older books and reread them to see what differences are years or even decades later.
Also I love the idea of being able to re read information from multiple disciplines together in some kind of giant fractal pattern and see what drops out. But that is very time consuming.
Some books like McLuhans Understanding Media are quite readable still and others aren’t so good, but the point is many writers have been speculating on the effects of socialisation and community for a very long time.
In essence what we see now are the same patterns on fast forward with feedback loops and much more dynamic interactions but similar cycles of change. Now it is possible to speed read 100 or more RSS feeds and get a much better idea where groups of people and ideas might be heading. However, there is still a need to decipher these clues and this is where attention profiling or some variation of it comes in.
What is different now is the impact of multiple trends and technologies working together. For example people using DIY apps to do their own attention profiling such as giant tag clouds for filtering and sorting.
I was reminded of the work of Jonathan Harris - who makes some kind of sense from this an anthropological display of clues writ large. There is a 20 min video on TED called The Web’s Secret Stories. There is even an API for the We Feel Fine project.
His computer programs scour the Internet for unfiltered content, which his beautiful interfaces then organize to create coherence from the chaos.
His projects are both intensely personal (the “We Feel Fine” project, made with Sep Kanvar, which scans the world’s blogs to collect snapshots of the writers’ feelings) and entirely global (the new “Universe,” which turns current events into constellations of words). But their effect is the same — to show off a world that resonates with shared emotions, concerns, problems, triumphs and troubles.
A few weeks back we noticed some unusual host visits from a product called Conversation Miner which is another way that people can use clever tools and filters to keep tabs on what is happening in their “patch. Aubrey Turner had a similar experience and was able to ask the “miner” what was going on. The response is below.
“We pull results a variety of ways, often starting with one of several different search engines and then using our own technology to screen those results. Once they have been pre-screened, one of our employees will actually visit the blog post and read it to determine if it is of interest to our client; the hit you saw was via that system.”
The reality is that networks amplify relationships and so the concept and practise of attention profiling will be one of the key trends as we look for ways to deal with the growth of online communities.
Dave has found a very practical and inspiring way of improving educational outcomes and helping teachers and parents with the Valencia 826 project which has now morphed into a national and international project now called 
Here are the details of TED for use
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