Waiter, why do you have your thumb on my steak?

I have quite simple criteria about whether I attend seminars or not - and one of the most basic is that if the synopsis contains the word 'game' then I'm there! So that explains why I ended up spending my lunchtime learning about Problem Oriented Engineering.


Jon Hall from the OU gave a seminar entitled Problem Oriented Engineering? I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. Jon admitted that this was the first time he'd tried to give the presentation using "I'm sorry I haven't a clue" as a model, and I applaud him for trying. Not sure in an hour long session you can fit in a passion for Humphrey Littleton and an explanation of the work they're doing designing a problem solving framework though...

I won't try and summarise the framework - if you're interested, I'll just point you to their site, the delightfully named 'SolveMeHappy'.

Now the bit that I want to write about is the game Jon got us to play to demonstrate some of the issues surrounding correctly defining a problem.

The room was split into two teams - one holding Problem cards (the first part of a joke) and the other team holding Solutions (the punch lines). Someone from the first team had to draw/mime their Problem, while their team guessed what it was - I did the first one, and drew a stick man with a golf club wearing two pairs of trousers, my team correctly worked out the question was "Why was the golfer wearing two pairs of pants?".

Then we pass over to the Solutions team, who have to find the solution whch one of them has on a card, then that person has to come and draw/mime the answer. In this case we had a mime of "because he got a hole in one".

After a couple more rounds we did the same thing, but this time NO feedback was allowed from the mimer to the guessers to confirm or deny what they thought the problem was.


Despite the poor quality of the above photo, the problem I drew (yes, me again - there wasn't a lot of volunteering from the rest of the audience!) was "Waiter, why do you have your thumb on my steak?". Remember, no feedback. They didn't have the foggiest what I'd drawn and I had no way to guide them. As a result the Solutions team randomly picked an answer that had something to do with sprouts (the small plant drawing next to mine), and we were all completely baffled why!

The point of all this was to get us to think about the importance of properly understanding the problem being asked, so you don't end up solving the wrong problem, or failing to solve any problem at all.

A nice example occured on round 3 when once the question had been drawn (the one above about a hedgehog crossing a road) one of the solutions team shouted out "to see his flatmate!". Of course, if someone on your team knows the solution, life is very much easier.

I think all this links to my post yesterday about knowing who to turn to when you have a problem - it's not so important that I know the solution as that I know who to turn to to help me find the solution. Twitter always amazes me - I put out a problem and someone, who I may or may not know, always replies. Usually, very helpfully.

So the problem solving game is changing, I can exploit my network to solve problems more quickly and easily that I ever could before. In fact, as demonstrated by Ben's comment on my blog post yesterday, sometimes my network helps me solve problems (like vulnerable code) that I didn't even know I had.

So basically Jon, I think you should drop the Humprey Littleton jokes, but keep the charades - and maybe someone will buy you a funnier joke book for Christmas ;-}

I don't know, but I know who knows. And that's the same?

I enjoyed watching the final part of the BBC's Virtual Revolution series this week. Lots about it made me argue - which is of course good, as I have plenty of opinions on the topic of social networking, information sharing etc, but delighted to see the BBC making a serious documentary on the subject.

The bit that fascinated me was the stuff about how the brain works with associative links, not linearly. Much like the web - jumping about between thoughts and ideas. This led on to their experiment to try and see how the web is affecting our brains (Web Behaviour Experiment), and classifying users based on how they acquire knowledge through the Internet - are you fast or slow, do you read everything - or just enough to make the next jump?

I, apparently, am a Web Fox: fast-moving, sociable and adaptable. This is what most teenagers seem to be these days. And I'm happy with this result.

I like to think that I acquire enough knowledge on my travels to know who, or where, to go next time I need to know something around that topic - without actually having to know it myself. This is the relating to the connectivism theory of learning, it's all about building your networks. And it usually stands me in very good stead.

Today however, I spent far longer than was necessary trying to write a few lines of code to display an image file from a database BLOB (sorry, the technical bits don't really matter to the thread of the story here!). The thing is, I'm now so reliant on my ability to access php.net, Google etc, that I don't even try and recall any knowledge I may already have and write code myself. So I spent ages googling for code examples of the thing I wanted to do - assuming, as usual, that it was out there for the taking. In this case it wasn't. I'd made a fundamental mistake (doing the wrong type of Oracle query) so the bits of code I did find didn't work. I needed someone to spell out the whole darn thing for me...and Google couldn't help.

Eventually of course I started from scratch and built up the code again from bits I properly understood and then it all worked. For those that do want to pull image blobs from an Oracle database and display them in PHP I'll put the code below anyway (so Google will hopefully help the next person).

So lesson learned, start with what I know and understand - and then use my network and Google to build on that. Don't expect them to do all the work for me.

---

Technical stuff

Images need to be seen as separate files with the right file types, so create a file called photo.php like this:

--open php--

header("Content-type: image/jpeg");

$id= $_REQUEST['id'];

include ('connect_to_your_database_stuff.php');

$sql = "select * from your_table where photo_field_id = '$id'";

$stmt = oci_parse($conn, $sql);

oci_execute($stmt)

or die ("Unable to execute query\n");

while ( $row = oci_fetch_assoc($stmt) ) {

print $row['IMAGE']->load()."\n";

}

include ('close_your_database_connection.php');

exit;

--close php--

Then you need to call this as if you were loading the jpg directly, ie:

in the page where you want to display your photo.

If Content is King, I declare Regicide

Imagine yourself as a museum designer - you are given a prestigious London venue, an amazing budget and a brief to be as interactive and high tech as possible. What's the catch? There is none, the material your museum covers is "British Music" - perfect you say.

Well, then how did the British Music Experience in the 02 get it quite so wrong?

On arrival you get shown into a pre-show, a short film where Lauren Laverne tells you how brilliant it will be when you go through the door.

Then you enter "the core" - with 8 rooms off it each covering a different period of British Music history. And in each of these - almost identical - rooms, is stuff, behind glass. To find out what the stuff is then you put on one of the two sets of headphones in front of each case, and do a bizarre fretboard interface to light up the thing you want to hear about. Only one person can do this. In fact tangled headphones are the primary theme of the place - everything requires you to put on headphones.

One of the rooms was good. It was the Gibson sound room - and, after a bit of queuing, you got to have a go on a drumset, a guitar or a keyboard - with headphones.


Here's Rob remixing a Queen track.



And my boys playing - this was the good bit. After this, everything else was frankly dull.

The thing I think was missing was any sense of the personalities invovled in British Music. True there was a Beatles case - flyers and instruments behind glass - but nothing about the people, well unless it was on one of the endless headphone tracks I didn't discover.

They made a big deal of their "smart tickets". The idea was when you found something interesting you could swipe your ticket and save the information - to save reading it now - to access on their website later.

Swiping my smart ticket on a sensor point.

This sort of worked, although it's frustrating on the website after that you can ONLY access material you swiped and not have access to the full resource.

In fact we spent one hour there in total. Hugely disappointing as we'd travelled up to London just for the "experience" and it had entertained none of us.

So to not make the day a washout we took the tube into Knightsbridge and went to Harrods. A much more rewarding experience. The kids were compeltely fascinated by the food hall:

And the top-end range of stuff truly does appeal to everyone - this is the new 3D tv from LG, no glasses required. Early days, but already quite impressive.

So in summary.

If you want to excite people about music, don't put memorobilia behind glass and think that's enough.

If you want a day out in London, don't go to the British Music Experience.

If you love technology, food, music, toys, clothes, luxury and really do want a British Experience...go to Harrods!

Filter and Assimilate

(Does that sound a bit Borg to you?)

In discussion with a colleague today we worked out that we have two very contrasting ways of gathering and sharing information, which I offer here out of interest and in hope somebody has some nice model that explains this nicely for me.

I gather information generously - I subscribe to loads of blogs and follow hundreds of people on twitter - in fact I track every source of information that I think might be interesting or useful to me. And then my work begins - I scan through, quickly filtering what is or isn't interesting and assimilating the things that are interesting, at least enough to work out whether to share it further or lodge in my brain for later!

My colleague on the other hand doesn't want to do the filtering. He chooses when and what information to go and look at, and trusts his colleagues to pass on to him anything they think he would find interesting.

An example would be if I stumbled across a particularly cool new app for the iPhone, I would post it up on twitter (with a suitably witty comment I hope). I know perhaps around 30% of my twitter followers have iPhones, but I assume the 70% who don't will just ignore my post. He, on the other hand, would send an email to only those people he knew who had iPhones sharing the link.

I think it's my audiences job to filter what is or isn't interesting to them - not mine. I hope there is serendipity at work and a connection will be made I could not have forseen. He thinks it's his job to not spam people with stuff they're not interested in and he'll do the work to decide who should read it.

Some of this is of course technology dependent. I also wouldn't spam people with email, and I can't target with twitter. But I also can't bring myself to unsubscribe from blogs, just in case I miss the next post with a real gem in it...I'm a glutton for the information overload.

I think the skills of filtering and assimilating are key to keeping up these days. Do you agree? Or should I put more trust in my network to bring me news that is relevant to me and spend more effort sharing with individuals rather than the whole world?

Photos of Other People's Children

I've been at a seminar again - and it's got me thinking. This week's topic: privacy and mobile technologies.
I attended a seminar by David Horner and Martin De Saulles (both University of Brighton) entitled: The portable panopticon: morality and mobile technologies. I apologise in advance to the authors for condensing their work into a few paras, but this is the general argument as I understood it:

Internet-enabled mobile devices are at the "permeation" stage of adoption - cheap enough to be in common use, but not yet at the "power" stage where they are deeply entrenched in society. So if there was ever a time to put any regulations or checks in place on how they are used (like in the States where they tried, unsuccessfully, to ensure all camera phones made a "shutter" noise so people knew they were being photographed) then that time is now.

The reason for the Panopticon title (a model of prisoner surveillance) is that in a society already dominated by observation, mobile devices decentralise the observation - and all of a sudden we are all the observers, observing each other and the police, Government. In the Panopticon, prisoners modify their behaviour as they know they might be being observed. Is the same true of us? Given any body might be live streaming a video of me every time I step outside my house, do I modify my behaviour? And as the owner of the mobile device, do I modify my own behaviour and not live video stream my next door neighbour, because social conventions are developing that says that's not a good way to behave?

Hence the title of this post - I was thinking about my personal groundrules on privacy. Above is a photo of Martin taken during the presentation, I didn't ask him if I could take this, I had my phone on silent so he doesn't know I took it, yet I feel perfectly comfortable about posting it up on my blog. I suspect the authors will be more concerned by my brief ramble through the topics in their paper than by the sneaky photo. But, I would never post up photos publically online, without consent, of other people's children. I imagine these are the sorts of social conventions that will develop.

However the other topic we touched on was how different age groups tend to have different notions of privacy. I suspect that most people tend to just go with the default settings when they post stuff up to Facebook etc (sorry, horrible generalisation) and the more familiar with the technology, the less you feel the need to restrict access to anything. I think that I make a quick but conscious decision whenever I post (or don't post!) something online about who will see it and who is affected by it being there. But I probably do break my own rules, especially when out and about with my iPhone, catching a fun photo here and there, and it being quite so easy to post it up to Twitter...maybe an "are you sure?" screen before any of us post anything would help!

When is a film not a film?

When it's an interactive film, or - as I see it - a game.

Today I went to a seminar on Sarah Atkinson's Crossed Lines project. Crossed Lines is an interactive film, featuring 9 separate filmed actors, played simultaneously in a grid, which you control using the telephone keypad to make the characters use their phones to speak to each other. It's a proper film, with a proper narrative plot and storyline - or storylines depending on which route you end up taking. I'm not sure that does it justice, so if you are interested I suggest you watch this short video about the project.

Sarah's research interest was about whether adding interactivity to a film actually caused the audience to lose immersion in the film. She talked about early examples of interactive films, which tended to revolve around who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire style voting buttons, the major drawback of which was it wasn't a personal experience, but a group decision. Not satisfying. They also tended to be on the cheesy side.

What Sarah has created is a truly personal experience - she showed user behaviour graphs which showed how people responded to the film and interacted with it in completely different ways. To me, it seemed some of the viewers were like cinema-goers, they watched the full clips, then tried the next button and watched the next section in full again. Other viewers reminded me of game player behaviour. They wouldn't necessarily watch the whole clip, they'd get the information they needed then choose the character they thought they should follow to progress the story and work their way to 'completion'. I think that although the interactivity might change the way viewers are immersed in the film it will increase engagement if they are playing a game.

There was some discussion after the talk about whether this was in fact a game or a film. Sarah doesn't try and label it - it's whatever you think it is, because it can be a personal experience. The discussion moved on to commercial applications and future-gazing and Sarah then used the delightful phrase "personalised fictional worlds". It seems that the ideal dramatic interactive video for a commercial application has not yet been cracked, and that's quite exciting to see develop.

And of course the educational potential is huge - a winning combination of video, narrative, and interaction which allows students to completely engage with scenarios and characters could have all sorts of applications.

Sarah has been working on this project for roughly 8 years, so I think she's ready to move on to a new project - I look forward to hearing about it, whatever it is!