Saturday, 30 May project is over this is my last blogwalk and as I walk up the hill this morning I’m going to stop every few paces to take a photograph to turn into a photosynth or experiment with photosynth. The week in Bath is over the project there I think was successful depends on what criteria we measure success I spent a stupid amount of time on Thursday evening and early Friday morning getting very little sleep and producing a media scape from the files that they had created which then failed for some unknown technical reasons possibly because I was building it on an emulator on the Macintosh due to lack of a suitable PC on which to do it so it could be it might have been but we didn’t get very much out of it at the end which would have been a shame I had to do some very quick thinking I got one of the students working on the idea of photographs for a photosynth tour and another student went round with a tripod on a camera making 360° panorama’s that we might include somewhere but a third one who is the girl who came up with the original idea of the treasure Trail and she is the one who was responsible for taking photographs and categorising them a 16-year-old very good with technology she is the one who was showing me how to do Bluetooth file transfer when I was going to put it onto a memory stick so in that sense she was already well ahead of me so I very quickly set her up with a laptop and showed her how to use mscape maker and she spent yesterday morning creating a media scape a simpler one that I have in mind but she got the hang very very quickly and she put all the photographs in the right place she set up the zones the regions the ambient sounds and all that sort of stuff and then a couple of times in the morning I had the younger boys go out and test it and it wasn’t brilliantly successful quite a number of the photographs didn’t come up when they were supposed to which I suspect was just down to GPS drift and there is a lot of programming that I would need to learn in order to make it robust I didn’t either get any of the tap the screen functionality into it I might have time to explore that but really I’m not so particularly bothered that we didn’t come up with a finished media scape because to my mind that wasn’t really the intention at all that was just the framework or one of the frameworks within which I was working I would like to produce it just for my own advancement as it were so that so I know thoroughly the In’s and outs of the programming but actually in my evaluation what I will probably say is that working with the technology that we have the old GPS devices only half of which worked working on PCs which I don’t have rather the Macs I’m not sure I can be too bothered to do it once it’s on the Mac platform and working on the iphone or on people’s own mobile phones then it becomes much more relevant to me when they have ownership of the equipment on which the media scape will run particularly so as I spent a lot of time working with devices that didn’t work that caught me out I spent a lot of time charging them up it takes an extraordinary amount of time charging up even five of these devices and then downloading all the bits and pieces that are needed it is simply very time-consuming and you have got to then be in control of keeping them all charged over the week and if you send a child out with one that doesn’t work particularly these children with such short attention spans it really doesn’t work at all so for those reasons I think I don’t have any particular need to make a finished polished media scape that is not what I’m about there were lots of other things that did interest me about the week that are very relevant one - the children were desperate to get an Internet connection and once they had got it, most of the time I didn’t allow them until just before lunch but once they had got it it was facebook it was youtube primarily and once they were sucked into that then they didn’t come out again but interestingly particularly the autistic boy and the youtube what he was pursuing was his passion he was imposing it on everyone else but his passion was rock music Guns and Roses and what he was looking at and trying to find out was to do with his passion and I guess that the facebook thing as well to an extent you know as a teenager communicating with your friends hanging about on street corners wanting to know the latest that is what it is all about and the software supports that and that’s certainly from my teenagers being with your friends and being in with the in crowd being dressed in the right way being seen to have the right phone being seen to fit in such a deep part of being a human being and being a young human being that nothing is going to conquer that really we put the school structures in place and try and fill up these young minds and the army like discipline the rows of benches the homework the cane the anger that cajoling all this sort of stuff with which we try and temper and control uniform when I had these children out of that situation and on a one-to-one they were just absolutely lovely they were gorgeous really friendly really nice to work with really keen and that was really interesting to me also the ability of computers to suck people particularly without the Internet one of them got very keen on taking photographs on the Photo Booth on the Mac and playing around with them and that ability of the computer particularly that self image thing that can be such a laugh, I don’t know how long it would last but it really does suck people in and it just fits in with my philosophy of just letting them play with the computer and explore the computer and see what it will do got and then gradually turn it to my own uses with them that’s what I am wanting to do all three playing around with their mobile phones fairly consistently but they were really interested in the project and they really got into it and they actually produced some really good work in the end so I was very pleased and I do believe that I have learned a lot as well.

As the website is sort of like a map of my ideas and shows that terrain through which I’ve been travelling over the last term I am just thinking that the site map at the end is the place to start actually that should be the first place so that you look at the map and you get an idea an immediate idea of the journey a bit like my memory in Belfast no Gallway a couple of years ago where when I looked at a map and I knew the city straight away but the directions where no good at all and I was also thinking in terms of both the blog and the notes to have at the end the entire text of both partly so you can see the extent of it straight away but also go through both perhaps and just highlight the very salient bits of it and then to explain both in the site map and in the relevant sections of the notes in the blog that’s what I’ve done so that would be sort of one more summary which gives you an immediate overview of the quantity plus picking out just a few of the very is essential important ideas

This project is all about mapping, mapping out my ideas and thoughts mapping out the project and how it’s going to work mapping out my explorations through text it’s all about maps and the website itself is to extent map and all lots of thinking around the topology and the history and topology time temporal spatial all those sort of things.

Tags:Sydney Gardens ProjectSilver ProjectPhotosynthSilver ProjectGPSSilver ProjectPedagogy