paradasos

Last summer, American writer Nicholas Carr prompted heated debate online when he released his book “The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember” The book was a development on the ideas he had previously explored in an earlier essay he had written for The Atlantic magazine under the contentious title ‘Is Google making us stupid?‘

In it, he posited that our brains are literally being rewired through constant Internet use. Having the sum collected product of all human knowledge available at our finger tips at all times causes us to be, mentally at least, in a permanent state of hunter-gatherer. Ever on the quest for new information.

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Last month, I had the idea of starting a podcast around the idea of mobile learning, digital media, social networking and everything in between. The first episode is available here. I’ve been writing the second episode ever since but given that it’s just a longform essay, I’m not sure of the merits of recording the audio when I can just post the text.

I’ll probably post it later today. In the meantime, here’s the transcript of the main feature from episode 1.

Last year, schools and universities across america invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in ipads for students. New York City public schools ordered more than 2,000 iPads, over 200 schools in Chicago applied for district-financed iPad grants, and Penn state university specifically designed one of their technical writing courses around the iPad and issued the devices to all students and faculty involved with the course. A prep school in Knoxville Tenassee even made it mandatory for all grade 4-12 pupils, that’s roughly age 9 or 10 onwards, to own iPads. The craziness looks set to continue this year though since the district of Maine has invested 200,000 dollars in 285 iPad 2s to be issued to kindergarteners, with the eventual aim of issuing them to all students in all 6 elementary schools in the small district.
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For a while I’ve been running two twitter accounts. @Fraser_I_smith for work and @paradasos for everything else. It seemed to make sense at first since there were many tweets and rants that weren’t exactly appropriate for work. Two accounts would keep the two separate.

I’ve found though that since I set up the second account, rather than tweeting more, as you might expect, I’m actually tweeting less. Probably something to do with the fact that, when faced with too many choices, the easiest option is to do nothing. If I couldn’t decide if a tweet was work appropriate, more often than not, I just wouldn’t bother tweeting it to either account.

To be honest as well, much as my work tweets have been the pinnacle of professionalism, they’ve been, well, boring! In an attempt to keep professional, I eliminated all personality from the account.

For that reason, I’ve decided to cancel the work account and just keep the one @paradasos account. Hopefully, what I lose in professionalism, I’ll make up for in personality.

Mark Zuckerberg once said in an interview that:

“You have one identity…The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

At the time, I disagreed with him completely, but here I am, merging my accounts. If you currently follow @Fraser_I_smith, please unfollow and follow @paradasos instead.

Goddammit, I hate it when Mark Zuckerberg is right!

Last week was, for a change, a busy week for gigs. Click the pics below to go to the full photo set on Flickr

Mogwai at the Classic Grand

The Go team at Oran Mor

Zoey Van Goey album launch at the Classic Grand

Pecha Kucha (pronounced pekak-cha) is a form of presentation designed to force speakers to ditch dull rambling talks and get to the point. The format is simple. Each speaker has just 20 slides which will display for exactly 20 seconds each, giving them just six and a half minutes to fully cover an idea.

Recently, I was asked to put one together for a conference I was attending on the topic of Creativity, Innovation and Technology. I chose the subject ‘Gamification’. The full video of the presentation is below.

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If you’re thinking about drawing a comic book, it might be a good idea not to spend several months on the first panel drawing EVERY SINGLE BUILDING IN GLASGOW.

I never was one to follow advice. At this rate, expect issue 1 some time around about my 80th birthday.

A combination of laziness and morbid curiosity led me to grow a beard recently.  It’s gone now but you can’t just shave a thing like that off without trying out a few new looks. Presenting: ‘beard impressions’.  Read the rest of this entry →

As you’ll no doubt be aware if you know me, since I bang on about it at any opportunity, I wrote a novel a few years back. A shoddy, first draft of a novel.

Pretty much ever since, I’ve had the ambition of redrafting it as a comic book. I’ve spent a long time thinking about every minor detail and paying it lip service, but so far, have managed to produce just under 3 pages in the last 2 years.

I’ve not been skiving though. Oh no. I’ve had very good reason. Quite simply, if I don’t read all the Twitter posts, Facebook status updates, watch all the kitten videos and keep up with the latest memes, then who will?

All the while, the backlog of writing, drawing and everything else has been steadily growing. For that reason, I’m going to try something out.

I’m giving up the internet for a few weeks. No Twitter, no Facebook, no Youtube. Not sure how I’ll last but I’m wasting far too much time so I need to try something. I might still post to Twitter and Facebook but I’ll be in write only mode.

Ironically, this should hopefully mean I actually appear more active online, since I’ll be producing stuff I want to share.

See you on the other side.