I have set up a place to post our stuff from the writing retreat (I know, I know, another b***** site). Bear with me

We do not have a projector but most of us have machines, I thought this might work as a whiteboard. I have not made the site private – yet. But we can.

http://emerge.posterous.com

Suggested schedule
0900-0930 Review: task briefing

1030-1100 coffee: Task 1 feedback

1230-1300 Task 2 feedback

1300-1330 Lunch:

1330-1400 Review balance in light of Tasks 1 & 2

1530-1600 Task 3 feedback

1600-1800 Walk in country

1800-1930 at ease/continue working

1930-late dinner

Task 1
a. Working title of your article

b. What is the central question that your article will pose?

c. Name 3 or 4 intended readers (no profiling) and say why they might be interested in this question.

d. Specific features of specific U&I projects that illustrate or support or otherwise illuminate your central question

e. If you had only one sentence to summarize your paper for your readers (above), what should it be? Focus on the outcomes from the work, not the inputs.

To post to the site email:

post@emerge.posterous.com

Posted via email from Emerge

I share Stephen Downes’ view (repeated here: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=47753 ) about efforts afoot to convert public wealth into private (and increasingly stateless) wealth. Actually the agency is too passive in that phrase – there are people working hard at it. PayPal is an example of an explicit attempt to engineer this. “One solution: move control of money from the government to individuals. But you can’t do this via plebiscite. If there was a form of money that government couldn’t measure or track, you’d have a powerful alternative. This insight was genesis of Paypal in late 1990s.” (http://tinyurl.com/brrqkt)

When I read Stephen’s post, reporting an observation by George Siemens (here: http://tinyurl.com/cwnn5l) I thought, holy cow! George Siemens thinks this way, too. But, that is not what his post says. Siemens takes a more cautious position, only suggesting that the digital technology-economy might enable creative nodes otherwhere than in the traditional geographical nodes of “cities and regions of creativity”.

This suggests that we are still seeing the absence (can you see an absence?) of much real critique of the fundamental status quo ante the “crash” of 2008 (bar the familiar: Chomsky, Monbiot, 2 citations here: http://georgeroberts.livejournal.com/35814.html) and more particularly no attempt to do anything but put the familiar economic order back in place with a few rich men forced to wear dunces caps for a day or two. Education, e- or otherwise can surely help at least to open this discussion. How about a MOOC (http://tinyurl.com/cxxhwf) on rebuilding wealth in the commons?

Posted via email from George’s posterous

Installing Parallels 4 seems to have been entirely unproblematic. It detected my Parallels 3 environment, backed it up, removed v3 and installed v4. I have about 4 back-ups lying around now, but it appears to have behaved very well. Time consuming given the number of times 12GB got copied. Nvivo is up and running maybe slightly faster than before (could hardly go slower!)

Posted via email from George’s posterous

I was mildly annoyed (a usual state for me) a year or three ago when Ericsson bundled Blogger in the firmware of their good camera phones. I didn’t want to set up a Blogger ID, all I wanted to do was post to Flickr. For a while I tried to use Shozu (http://www.shozu.com/portal/index.do), but its Java applet crashed my phone. Repeatedly. I expect things are better these days. Now, of course, Flickr has email uploader addresses and phones pretty much come with mail accounts nnn@telco.com but I never really got my head around them. Then, I stumbled on Posterous via Iain Dodsworth’s TweetDeck blog (http://tweetdeck.posterous.com/). Posterous has about the easiest sign-up facility of any site, ever, and an “autopost to everywhere” service (http://posterous.com/autopost) that lets you send mails to e.g. flickr@posterous.com. So, I activated my dormant 3-mail account told posterous that it was mine and, snap. Take a pic and email to flickr@posterous.com. It just works. I like services like that. My posterous is here.

Posted via email from George’s posterous

Contemporary poetry often runs the risk of being all together too much of the academy and not enough of the world. The poet needs to be a wilfully unmediating existential context for poetry drawn from a globally localised collective unconscious. Either the force exerted by poems must be immediate, direct and great or, like the butterfly wings of chaos, its influence might be indirectly to generate a tsunami in a remote, uncertain location.

Posted via email from George’s posterous

But the tags do not propagate to this WP bog. I have added them, later. It is interesting using email as a blogging environment. I have been using Ecto for several years to post to LiveJournal, WordPress and TypePad blogs or using web interfaces for Elgg (or feeds in). One good thing about Ecto is that it keeps local copies of my writing, which are then backed up. Given I squirrel my email away and seldom delete anything, I suppose using my mail client as a blog authoring environment achieves the same end. By tagging the post in the heading I would even be able to use the search facility to find items. Of course there is not so much control over formatting; or, I haven’t yet found it. I wonder if I gave up my luddite attachment to courier monospace for writing mails and went for RTF or html mail, whether the formatting would be carried through to Posterous and the items re-posted from there?

Posted via email from George’s posterous

I like Posterous (http://posterous.com/). It is extremely easy to set up an account and it does useful things via email. I have posted this to my Brookes Blog and my Posterous blog from my email client. It is also possible to update Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, other blogs. See http://posterous.com/autopost. I am still exploring the service, but I like what I see.
 
Now, if you could add tags from inside the email.

Posted via email from George’s posterous