eLearning Africa - Lusaka

I am delighted that me and my colleague Stephen have been invited to present our African Digital Diaries project at this year's eLearning Africa Conference in Lusaka in May.

We have been scheduled in a keynote session at the conference and we are getting a lot of attention. The fight is now on to raise the funds -- in a matter of weeks -- to bring some of our African colleagues to the conference. Our aim is to give a voice to the ordinary Africans who are making their way in the digital universe through a mixture of ingenuity, adaptation and sheer persistence. It is an unashamedly grassroots and narrative-led look at things. We aim to be a bit disruptive.

Orwell Prize

In my enthusiasm for Winston Smith I forgot to mention that Mary Beard and Hopi Sen -- both old favourites of mine -- are also on the shortlist for the Orwell Prize Blog Category. Just these three show a really great range of what blogging can do. I will enjoy exploring the others as well.

While I was Away II

Christmas was a long time ago, we are now approaching Easter. But as I look out of the window and see the snow falling again Spring also seems a long way away.

Lookig back though, my Christmas Day was fabulous. I had somewhere between 30 and 40 guests for lunch.

 Here are some of them:

It was bakingly hot and Zanzibar was in the middle of a 3 month power cut. My chefs Zaharani and Masoudi, however, did a sterling job getting food ready for the crowd

And they also did a great job with "Chef Service" making sure the food got distributed quickly and fairly

They needn't have worried they had made plenty

Even the Maasai -- who can be fussy guests -- were happy

 

  And the gifts went down well...

Playing Santa I was a little concerned I hadn't brought enough pressies. Luckily I did have a fallback... As a seasoned traveller I never leave home without a supply of false moustaches and these were called into play to make up numbers. Very popular too!

  

But respect must utlimately go to the chefs who deserved their rest at the end of a busy Christmas Day...

While I was Away...

 

We reached Uhuru Peak on Kilimanjaro at 0715 on January 8th. Picture (from right) shows me, Head Guide Happyson, Bob, Assistant Guide Jonas and Pete. It was a beautiful morning and a great feeling.   

Animal Farm

I recommend Winston Smith's blog . It's this year's Nightjack. Given both its quality and the writer's nom de guerre it is apt that it has been chosen for the Orwell Prize blog shortlist.

Winston's diary is subtitled "Working with the Underclass".  It is an occasional but harrowing journal of his professional life as a care worker for young people. It's really more Hogarth than Orwell. He portrays the gallery of grotesques he encounters working with troubled, out of control, and -- peculiarly to me -- often obese teens. I say peculiar because my imagination always gives me skinny and rat-like when I hear the word "feral" and that is one of Winston's favourite epithets.

Like Nightjack it is compelling because it is real life -- stories not statistics, grassroots not theory,  reportage by someone on the frontline in some of the places we would generally not know about. It is genuinely disturbing. Not so much in its descriptions of unruly, unpleasant, a-social young people -- anyone who walks the streets, travels public transport, lingers in a school or A&E in our big cities will recognise the cast of characters. What is shocking is how "authority" deals with them. What is truly shocking is the complicity of councils, social workers, procedures and ideologies in creating these miserable lives that go on to inflcit misery on those around them. The failures of these "systems" and the System are abject.

We may not agree with all of Winston's analyses or proposed solutions but his witness has to be heard.
  

Young Fashionistas

My nieces practise their fashion styling skills on grandpa. He is, they say, now dressed as a beautiful young woman.

The American Right Wing

I have never been a member of the American right wing so cannot leave it. But Charles Johnson has and is now -- as he says -- leaving the right. He explains very succinctly here.

There seems to me -- a mere outsider -- to be a huge gap in American political discourse just now. Where can you go if you are a decent,  broadly conservative, easy-going person who believes in basic Amercan values but doesn't want them laced with hatred and nutty conspiracy theories?

Terrifying you all

Ronald Reagan once said...

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' "

How about some more nine word frighteners?

"And now Thought for the Day with Anne Atkins"
"I'm in the sauna with John Prescott, join us!"
"Look Morrisey has come along to cheer you up"

Further suggestions....

Kili Training

The training continues in the Brecon Beacons and other local mountains. It looks like I am ski-ing uphill -- more or less sums it up.

Ugandan Affairs

The art of headline writing lives in this wonderfully schizophrenic tabloid story from Uganda. One can't help but feel the paper's lurid homophobia may be covering deeper tendencies...tongue in cheek or perhaps between cheeks?

BBC and BNP

The BBC's defence of Radio 1 Newsbeat's kid-glove handling of BNP spokespeople is unravelling. Roy Greenslade's criticisms of the corporation's journalistic failure appear to have been vindicated and now there is worse . I do wonder why the BBC is bending over quite so cravenly to the BNP? I am all in favour of the party being featured on BBC programmes like putting Griffin on QuestionTime. The BNP's lack of ideas and pointless hatreds collapse under fairly modest challenge. The criticism of Newsbeat is that there was no hard questioning, challenge or it seems basic research.

In a small way I experienced the BBC's jitters a few months ago. Asked for my views on a Radio 4 website I decided to contribute to a debate about protestors pelting Nick Griffin with eggs. I simply wrote that this was a time honoured British tradition for dealing with the pompous and unpopular. Of all people, Nick Griffin -- who constantly says that his party is the home of British heritage -- should understand this. My comment was moderated out straight away. Opinions like this clearly have no place on a BBC website. When I complained about the moderator's action I was warned that I was in contravention of the BBC website guidelines and if I persisted could be banned from any future participation...so much for the BBC and free speech.

Friends in the North

I have just spent the weekend in the north east of England – beautiful weather and lots of fun in all respects. A highlight for me was seeing the Trinity Square multi-story car park in Gateshead made famous of course by its central role in Get Carter. Sadly dilapidated and slated for demolition by Tesco this monstrous structure has an eerie beauty. When the film was made it was still representative of “space age” modernity. Now it’s an unloved icon in the midst of a city centre desperate to regenerate itself. I wonder how far into the future we will have to go before we fall back in love with 60s and 70s brutalist concrete? Too long probably, or at least long enough for it all to have been dynamited or succumbed to concrete cancer.

I don’t use the term icon lightly. On the whole I am with Jonathan Meades on this exhausted word. But here I think it is right. Everyone will talk about the car park and show it to you with a semi-detached pride. There is a “Get Carter Butchers” in one the nearby down-at-heel retail parades. Taxi drivers jump at the chance to talk about memories of the location filming even if they are probably too young to really remember it. I think it will leave a hole when it’s blown up. It may be the hole of a healed scab or a lanced boil but something will have gone.

I would like to see a rehabilitation into something useful and worthy of local and national pride. A museum and interpretation centre for British Gangsterism is the top canddate right now – perhaps not top of Heritage Lottery Fund priorities.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

My nephews in Cornwall bring in the harvest...

At this time...

Another lingusitic mystery....Why do officials -- airline cabin staff in particular -- like to say "at this time" when they mean "now" or "right now"? I have never heard a real person use this rather strangled phrase. There is of course the officialese user's fear of the single perfectly adequate word, add more, add more and you sound more important. But I don't think that tells the whole story. Will ponder.

Ways with Words

African English and uses of English are sources of endless joy. My two favourites for this trip have been:
"God Help Us Driving School" and "No Wife Video Library"