In a gloriously open brief, he asked me whether I’d prefer to talk about things I make or things I collect. For some reason I thought sharing a collection of my collections would be the most interesting option, and soon started putting together some examples. This morning, in a last-minute moment of self doubt, I realised how much cooler I’d have looked if I’d shared some of the hacks and tinkering projects I’ve worked on over the years. Like this and this and this and this. Not that much cooler, you say? Oh well.

Geeky things I obsessively collect and curate it is then…

I asked my wife what she thought, but she just laughed and pointed out a few extra collections I’d forgotten about and she’d never understood. How is it even possible for someone to throw away empty Altoids tins? They’re so keepable.

Just before the talk, anticipating there would be time for questions, I added a blank slide followed by a secret extra slide with my prediction of the first question that would be asked: “Where do you find the time?”. It turns out I guessed right, which got a big laugh. I’m sure the person who asked it didn’t mean it in a negative way, but it’s easily interpreted as “why do you waste your time with something I wouldn’t bother with?” and is not that different from claiming someone has too much time on their hands. So I blushingly pointed out that the question could be seen as slightly rude, and went on (hopefully not too defensively) to say that this was a very condensed view of many years of collections, very few of which have lasted very long or required very much time. Each one has taught me something and been valuable in its own way, and been more than worth the amount of time I’ve invested in it. Hard not to sound defensive though, so I also acknowledged that obviously I’m a bit of a geek, some of these things have been (sometimes short-lived) obsessions, and I wouldn’t expect other people to enjoy or value everything which I do in the same way.

We went on to discuss how the internet is a million niches, something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few years.

Thanks to Huey for the invite. I really enjoyed it.

I really enjoyed Playful 08 so was delighted to be asked back. Last year I demoed my Rock Band MIDI guitar hack. This year, rather than extend my P5 Glove project into another MIDI instrument, I decided to set myself the challenge of talking about games and films. This was perhaps a little foolish, as I know only a little bit about games and barely anything about films. However, the audience were mercifully forgiving of my ill-prepared nonsense and laughed in all the right places.

In case you missed it, here are my slides, complete with dodgy audio recording of the talk.

Thankfully for all concerned, the rest of the day was much better. Here’s some of what happened:

• Leila Johnston talked about Enemy of Chaos (“something for the aging nerd market…”).
• Kareem Ettouney (Media Molecule Art Director) talked about being a servant rather than a director, and the importance of letting people pursue personal projects.
• Daniel Soltis talked about physical computing and games.
• Lucy Wurstlin talked about 4iP.
• Matt Locke interviewed Robin Burkinshaw about his amazing creation Alice and Kev: the story of being homeless in The Sims 3.
• James Bridle not only described but actually showed us a working version of MENACE, Donald Michie’s Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine, a physical computer made of 304 matchboxes. (A similar machine for ‘Go’ would be “about the size of the crab nebula”.) His excellent presentation is now online.
• Katy Lindemann showed us how fun and play drive change with some lovely examples (including Vinspired Voicebox, Chore Wars, Didget glucose monitor for DS, Fiat Eco:Drive, Thefuntheory (including the Piano Staircase, Bottle Bank Arcade Machine) and more.
• Tassos Stevens talked about cricket.
• Russell Davies made us agree the foursquare conventions for London (Parks: in, Outdoor markets: in, Small shops: out, Train stations: in, Tube stations: out, Supermarkets: out, Your home: out) and talked about and prototyped ‘barely games’. His presentation is here.
• Molly Range talked about the serious games scene in Scandanavia.
• Duncan Gough wondered what it would be like to play a game of ‘Kes’ (or ‘The Wire’…), and imagined fictive worlds which are somewhere between fantasy and casual games. He also pointed out the ‘the golden age of children’s story-telling’ (Press Gang, Running Scared) was at a time when broadcasters didn’t keep everything. Where’s the archive of those TV programmes? Lost forever?
• Alfie Dennen and Paula Le Dieu talked about Bus-Tops.
• Rex Crowle did live scribblings on an Over Head Projetor and talked about selling his flock of sheep to buy an Amiga.
• Simon Oliver explained that designing games is hard but you can discover the fun through prototyping.
• Tim Wright talked about his Kidmapper project which involved following the route of Robert Louis Stevenson Kidnapped in real time.
• Chris O’Shea finished the day by sharing a portfolio of his work.

A great day with lots to take home and think about. Thanks to Toby Barnes and everyone else at Pixel-Lab for making Playful happen.

More people who have written about it: Suw Charman-Anderson, Leila Johnston, Howard Pull, Adam Davis, Lawrence Chiles, Libby Davy, Daniel Soltis, Priyanka Kanse, Melinda Seckington and more, plus the official record: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

I broke the ice by reminiscing about an afternoon almost exactly 11 years ago in which some friends and I ‘borrowed’ some sort of evergreen tree from the local park in order to make our sixth form common room more festive. It certainly wasn’t a christmas tree, and it smelled of cats.

It’s hard not to be sentimental about coming back to the school. Partly because I have some genuinely warm memories of it, partly because it’s where my Dad now works (as a counsellor, offering a drop-in service for young people who need help) and partly because it’s where I met my wife, when we were taking our A-Levels together.

What do you want to be when you’re older? Have you ever been asked the question? Have you ever asked it of someone else? Do you know what your answer would be?

When I was 15, I knew exactly what I wanted to be; a lawyer. Specifically, a barrister. But it didn’t work out that way. In the end, choosing a degree ended up being about picking a subject I knew I’d enjoy more, and my hobby since I was quite young had been tinkering with computers and programming them. This was before the school offered an A-Level in ICT, so all the way through school it was purely a hobby for my own enjoyment.

In case that sounds strange, or you’ve never experienced the satisfaction of getting a computer to do exactly what you want, here’s a quote from a new book by Cory Doctorow, ‘Little Brother‘ from the end of chapter 7:

A computer is the most complicated machine you’ll ever use. It’s
made of billions of micro­-miniaturized transistors that can be
configured to run any program you can imagine. But when you sit
down at the keyboard and write a line of code, those transistors do
what you tell them to.

Most of us will never build a car. Pretty much none of us will
ever create an aviation system. Design a building. Lay out a city.

Those are complicated machines, those things, and they’re off­
limits to the likes of you and me. But a computer is like, ten times
more complicated, and it will dance to any tune you play. You can
learn to write simple code in an afternoon. Start with a language
like Python, which was written to give non­-programmers an
easier way to make the machine dance to their tune. Even if you
only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it.
Computers can control you or they can lighten your work ­­ if you
want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write
code.

When I was picking a subject in which to take a degree, I realised that if I wanted to really understand computers, and maybe even get a job doing the things I most enjoyed, I could study Computer Science. I found a few really good courses which looked like they’d be a lot of fun. Even better, I found one which was sponsored by IBM; 3 days a week at university, 2 days a week at work, less holiday than most students, but also fewer debts.

After I graduated IBM offered me a full-time job and I accepted, working first as a tester (finding bugs), then service (fixing them and keeping clients calm), then development (writing code and creating the bugs), then emerging technology (first-of-a-kinds and proof-of-concepts, with a lot of freedom to explore new stuff). That freedom to explore brand new territory is how I ended up calling myself a Metaverse Evangelist; I got interested and involved, together with my friend Ian and eventually with a wider team across the world, with how IBM and its clients could use virtual worlds.

In total, I enjoyed 10 long and productive years in different roles in the Hursley lab before I realised it was time to think about moving on.

Earlier this year, I joined the BBC as Portfolio Executive, Social Media – BBC Vision. Social media includes tools for discussing and sharing information, and BBC Vision is the division of the BBC that handles TV. So I look after social online stuff for BBC TV. Half of the room I’m speaking to (that is, the half that are not parents and teacher) probably live their lives on some combination of Bebo, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, MSN, etc. It may seem strange to think that a huge part of my job is understanding how the BBC can use those things, plus other social stuff (blogs, message-boards, chat, rating, comments, games, …) effectively. That job exists now, but a few years ago I could never have guessed I’d be doing it.

Which leads us back to the question, what do you want to be when you’re older? I pointed out that it’s very hard to answer, because you’re making a prediction about what you’ll enjoy in the future.

My ‘career’ has included software testing, service, development, emerging technology, social media. Each of those things has, for me, led to the next, but it’s not a map, it’s a history. It’s one possible route to have taken to get somewhere I didn’t even plan to go in the first place. The job I’m doing now didn’t exist last year. The virtual worlds role was one that a colleague and I created ourselves.

So what would I have wanted to know, if I were in the room having just received my certificates? Well, I’m going to share some secrets from the so-called grown-up world.

It’s OK not to have a plan. In fact, there is no plan. ^[1] Your parents and teachers may look like they know what they’re doing, and they may expect you to have your life mapped out, but here’s the shocker: they’re all making it up as they go along! It’s perfectly OK to do what you think is fun and interesting. Of course, choosing the things you want to focus on means you’ll need to know enough about the world to know what you find fun and interesting, which means you’ll have to be open minded rather than passive. Most importantly you’ll need to be flexible and prepared to change.

I ended by saying that I hoped they’d have as much fun as I’ve had. I’d been wondering about a closing line (everything I’d thought of leading up to the event had been sickeningly trite and glib. “What do you want to be when you’re older? I hope you’ll be happy” just wasn’t going to work), but somehow, just as I was finishing off, I got into a nice little “I hope you… ” pattern. I hope you’ll have as much fun as I’ve had… so it felt quite natural to end on “I hope you’ll change the world” ^[2].

1 – Last month, I shared what I was planning to talk about during the speech, and asked what other people would have wanted to tell their younger selves. The response was staggering. I could have spent hours going through it with them in detail, and really wanted to. If you’ve found this post because you saw the talk, please do take the time to read it. At the risk of sounding like a grown up, I wish I’d seen all of that when I was your age.

2 – As I sat down, I realised where I’d seen that recently; the introduction to Little Brother ends with “He [Cory Doctorow] hopes you’ll use technology to change the world”. Considering that I was unintentionally borrowing Cory’s phrase, I’m glad I missed the bit about technology.

The abstract said that

Roo Reynolds has offered to not pre-prepare any slides for his closing keynote, but instead create a short presentation on the fly during the other sessions. Drawing on the notes and photographs taken
during the conference, he’ll act as a virtual cheat-sheet for the event.
He’ll share his notes, including what he found most interesting and what he’ll take away from it, wrapping up the two days by distilling any key themes and considering what we’ve learned about learning. Perhaps he can pull the threads together into something which will make sense. It makes predicting what he’s going to say particularly tricky, but it could be fun.

The results from this afternoon are embedded below. I’ll let you decide how well I met my (scary, self-imposed) brief. I would say that I didn’t take as many photos as I planned (I either need a better camera or a portable lighting rig), and I ended up trawling my own back catalog of photos to illustrate certain points. Also, I was a smidgen more didactic than I’d intended. I was (and am) very tired. In fact, I was up at 2:30 am this morning pulling together my notes from yesterday. Four hours sleep is not enough for me and perhaps being tired made me more challenging – and less congratulatory – than I could have been.

More importantly, my apologies for only drawing on a very small selection of the papers presented at the conference. With 4 or 5 streams running at once (and especially with the rooms spread across the campus) it just wasn’t possible to see everything. Much of what I did see really impressed me and I really enjoyed the conference.

Update: a video of the presentation, with the slides nicely inter-cut, is now online.

Want more?

• Videos from Day 1 (be sure to watch Ted Castranova’s opening keynote) and Day 2
• Schome is the project that made me shed a tear
• Simon Bignell aka Milton Broom has some excellent work in psychology. See especially Problem-based Learning in Virtual Interactive Educational Worlds for Psychology (PREVIEW-Psych)
• Sarah aka Intellagirl and her great presentation
• ‘Second Life is not the only fruit’ is the one-sentence summary of the latest snapshot of virtual world activity in UK Higher and Further Education by Virtual World Watch and the Eduserv Foundation. Well worth reading
• More blogs: ReLIVE08 live blog, Niall Sclater, Daniel Livingstone, …
• relive08: Flickr photos, Delicious bookmarks, Twitter search

Instead, I recorded the audio, took some notes on paper and threw some summary slides together on the way home. Here they are.

Thanks to Dan, Kim and Foe for being excellent panelists.

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I’ll post my notes on the day later when my brain recovers a bit more. Rest assured it every bit as interesting as last year. Update: my notes are here.

For now, see my Flickr set, interesting2008 on Flickr and
interesting2008 on Technorati.

Update: the Guardian are hosting a series of videos of the Interesting 2008 talks. Here’s my talk.

I was invited to do something on Web 2.0 and ‘where is technology headed’. After some thought, I’ve written up some notes about social networking, user generated content and virtual worlds in relation to presentations, conferences and events. Inevitably, I ended up thinking mainly about the Backchannel, in its many current forms. Much of that is catching up with what’s been going on in the past few years.

Photo of the Academy Workshop at the Annenberg Center for Communications at the Unversity of Southern California by Justin

Some of this goes back a long way. In 2003 the New York Times quoted a number of internet thought-leaders…

Some people, of course, ignore speakers entirely by surfing the Web or checking their e-mail — a practice that has led some lecturers to plead for connectionless auditoriums or bans on laptop use. But others are genuinely
interested in a lecturer’s topic and want to talk concurrently about what is being said. They may also like to pass around links to Web sites that relate to, and may refute, a speaker’s point. For them, wireless technology allows a back channel of communication, a second track that reveals their thoughts and feedback and records it all for future reference.

“We’re just moving the corridor into the room and time-shifting it by 30 minutes,” said Mr. [Cory] Doctorow, who takes notes and posts them to his Weblog, or blog, during conferences, enabling people to follow the
speaker and Mr. Doctorow’s take on the speaker at the same time.

“To me, it’s a little irritating, frankly,” said Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of Ludicorp, a company that is developing [Game] Neverending, a multiplayer online game [which would go on to become Flickr]“

Joi Ito: ”I want to make something that I can put in a suitcase and take to conferences,” he said. He describes it as a subversive device that will get people thinking about the significance of the back channel. From the chat
room, he said, ‘”you could send something like, ‘Stop pontificating.’”

That NYT piece also quoted Clay Shirky on in-room chat as a social tool. He has a great paper on the subject on OpenP2P.com from December 2002:

“once the meeting got rolling, the chat room became an invaluable tool”

“Group conversations are exercises in managing interruptions. When someone is speaking, the listeners are often balancing the pressure to be polite with a desire to interrupt, whether to add material, correct or contradict the speaker, or introduce an entirely new theme. These interruptions are often tangential, and can lead to still more interruptions or follow-up comments by still other listeners. Furthermore, conversations that proceed by interruption are governed by the people best at interrupting. People who are shy, polite, or like to take a moment to compose their thoughts before speaking are at a disadvantage.” … “The chat room undid these effects”

One of the interesting things about Clay Shirky’s work on in-meeting chat was the large shared screen showing the chat to everyone (in addition to the personal window into the chat.) Here we see that happening at a Le Blogs 2.0 panel…

Photo of on-screen backchannel at Les Blogs 2.0 by Bjoern.

Turning the backchannel from a private thing into a public part of the event is something Cote thought about when blogging about the use of Twitter at conference:

“Things get fascinating when people project that backchannel in a public place,if not right behind the speaker. The idea is to weave the “front-channel” and backchannel together as needed. In doing so, the hope is to add even more value to the talk and conference. This kind of thing freaks the crap out of some (most?) presenters, while others are neutral, and some like it.”

Elizabeth Lane Lawley describes herself as a Backchannel Queen:

“I like the IRC banter—and not just for its entertainment value. I find that particularly when a presentation might be rough, or something I’ve heard before, that the feedback loop provided by the other participants, snarky or
not, often helps me see the content in a new light, and immediately increases the value I take out of the experience.”

Teachers are getting into backchannels too:

“The backchannel has really become my favorite tool of choice when I’m presenting. I’ve purchased an inexpensive ad-free chat room at Chatzy that is password protected and use it for my backchannels when I present. I like to find two people to help: one to serve as Google Jockey (a/k/a Link dropper) and another to serve as a moderator — posing questions to me”

All of which brings us nicely up to date. I won’t be quoting all of that in the talk, but it’s now safely in my head. For the glimpse into the future, I’ll be bringing in virtual worlds and and their use in the backchannel (and more) too, but that’s a conversation for another post.

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I’ve trimmed it down to an hour, but included most of the Q&A/discussion at the end, which included:

• How to virtual currencies and real money interrelate?
• How did IBM get started in virtual worlds
• How do virtual worlds compare with teleconferencing and videoconferencing?
• What do you think we should be focusing on in the next 12 months? What kind of applications?
• User generated content vs keeping control

It’s a slightly re-worked and reduced version of the Warwick one, with a (tiny) bit of the CIO 2010 Outlook mixed in for good measure.

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I also recorded the audio for the rest of the session. I really like how the various parts fit together. Here’s the whole thing:

• Enterprise 3.D – Roo Reynolds [slides and audio also embedded above]
• The Bebo Boomers – Ewan McIntosh [audio]
• Connecting with the Millennium Generation: how will information centres respond? – Mary Ellen Bates [audio] [slides] [blog]
• Panel Q&A with the three of us [audio] [blog]

Ewan invited questions from audience via a roving microphone, but also while the event was still happening, via Twitter and comments on his blog. Ewan was, I think, the only session moderator to try this, and as far as I could see it really worked. It was fun, and I’d like to do more of that sort of thing. Thanks Ewan.

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