Recently @dajbelshaw@mastodon.social posted about the fact we cannot apply the “old” model for a “successful” life:

work hard, save patiently and climb the career ladder, max out your pension

It’s a depressingly accurate article and one I agree with. He also connects this to the issue of starting a career with university debt, which compounds the problem. Starting a career with £27,750 of graduate debt is far from ideal, and the current economic climate makes this burden even more problematic.

However, this raises a deeper question about the reductive argument that university education should command higher future wages.

I believe education should be free, with the state and universities funding study through to PhD level. At Winchester School of Art, we’ve taken a small step in this direction by introducing scholarships (from 24/25) that reduce fees for home students pursuing master’s programmes.

A well-educated society is vital—though universities aren’t the only institutions that can provide this education. The recent introduction of V-Levels (planned for September 2027) is a case in point. While these new vocational qualifications aim to simplify the post-16 landscape by replacing around 900 existing qualifications including BTECs, they exemplify a concerning trend: education increasingly designed around “real-world job standards” and employer-led outcomes. For creative disciplines, this creates particular challenges. BTECs have been a successful pathway into creative higher education precisely because they allowed for exploration and development rather than narrow technical training. Their replacement with qualifications explicitly framed around immediate employability risks diminishing the very qualities that make creative education transformative.

This brings me to my central concern: we must challenge the reductive framing that has taken hold—the idea that university education is purely an economic transaction where students pay fees in exchange for highly paid jobs. This transactional mindset has dominated since the introduction of fees and the subsequent push for mass university attendance. The declining graduate premium only exposes the hollowness of this framing: if the financial return is diminishing, the transactional model collapses entirely.

Education should be transformative, not merely transactional. When we reduce it to a financial exchange—or worse, to a skills pipeline for industry—we diminish both its intrinsic value and its broader social purpose. A well-educated society needs critical thinkers, creative problem-solvers, and people who can engage meaningfully with complex ideas, not just workers trained to meet current employer demands.

Yesterday a student asked me if we have a Lightbox, this hasn’t happened for years, we now have very light and bright what they call A3 light tables. This request reminded me of one summer when my mum (and perhaps Grandad) helped me build a Lightbox for my studies, I felt the cost of a shop bought one wasn’t something I wanted to afford or could really afford, this also reminded me that when I started University my Grandad would send me money each month (into my bank). He was keen on Art and asked me a lot about what I was learning, he painted a little himself but had always worked for Thames Water, no one in our family had gone to University but it felt more like I was the first to be able to truly follow my passion, that of studying Animation, both Mum and Grandad are now gone, Grandad didn’t even get to see me complete my BA, Mum saw me get my PhD, but didn’t make it to the official ceremony itself. It’s funny how things trigger memories.

Having worked on my own spatial hypertext tool (nodenogg.in) built from and found an education need upwards for the last 5/6 years to see another tool enter the arena from a big player in the form of Apples Freeform is yet another let down.

I’m not surprised but for a new Apple product in a long time, was iWork the last?

There is no innovation beyond other current products like Miro, Mural, FigJam, Milanote or Muse (the list goes on dare I mention $2m in VC for tldraw only a week or so ago)

Freeform is so woefully not different or new. I mean it will probably Shelock a few of these products unfortunately out there but there is way more resistance to Apple lock in now.

I for one don’t need the next big reason I can’t leave macOS or iOS to be not only are my photos locked in but also my thinking. Of course it always totally rails against principles I have defined in my research relate to thinking in a networked system and a spatial hypertext system in the tools for thought space that they and other education technology must be;

Private, local-first, free (libre) software, modular and (data) easily exportable.

Apple has so lost its way unfortunately.

Another good core int from @manton & @danielpunkass good to hear web copy and paste has improved since I last hacked it for nodenogg.in and input Color picker too. The opensource discussion hits on the issue with opensource licences. Go for a proper free software GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 license as this means future contributions are to the wider software eco system not necessary back to your product they can still sell products etc but they can’t lock down the new code. Again it’s about thinking about different approaches to sustainable software. A big concern is a lot of our tech stacks rely on open source and these projects do not have many contributors really beyond a core group that is often small and vulnerable. dctr.pro/2ni

Pretty good week, took games students to “retro” arcade in Southampton and sent year 1 to escape rooms, edited more of PhD into actual useful structure and hope much like @manton for the release aka hand in 25th March to be over… until VIVA / corrections had the awesome Toby from Moving Brands Labs in talking about Extended Reality and had craft beer and tacos, but am now shattered, annoyingly bus replacements for trains meant there was no way was I going to Wimbledon today, when my trip times had tripled, and now HT losing 0-1, dam it COYD

Audio Version

From Feb I will be the brand new Interim Head of an also brand new Department of Art & Media Technology at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

Hopefully if successful I will be able to make it a more permanent role (application and interview dependant)

But from Feb to August I will still be Programme leader for BA Games Design & Art so I will be pretty busy however I have plans…

At the end of Jan I should have internally submitted my PhD text and come the end of March be waiting on my viva dates hopefully end of Easter / early summer so come Sept I will finally officially be Dr. Procter.

So if things go to plan I could be a Doctor running a new department with some exciting approaches to technology and humans from October.

As anyone who has read my blog or knows me I am very keen to push back on big tech, surveillance capitalism and this is something that has been my conversation piece to enable me to be given the interim role so embedding ethical and humane technology thinking and criticality in the new Department will be fundemental.

The Department already has amazing staff and students and a brilliant set of programmes of study.

Combine this with new structures and new programmes to come starting in earnest in October 2022 it is all pretty exciting.

Much hard work to come but it feels like an exciting new chapter awaits.

Of course I’ll keep people up to date on my blog if it all falls apart 🤣😬 or not 😊🙌

In a short commentary posted to her website in 2004, science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that the concept of technology is “consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialized technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.” Rather, she argued, technology should be understood more expansively, as the way “society copes with physical reality… the active human interface with the material world.” Technology, as the sum of “what we can learn to do.”

• Introduction | New_ Public Magazine

Episode 32 sees us catching up with Adam Procter, who is the Programme Lead for Games Design and Art at The Winchester School of Art, at The University of Southampton. We have a fascinating discussion covering everything from retro gaming and innovative tech right through to open-source, free-software. Plus, I also give my Pocket Operator (PO12 Rhythm) a spin just to give it that old school ‘Super Nintendo’ vibe! Stephan is back too, keeping us posted on things over in the States including some academic book reviews - brace yourselves, it is a long one!

Here is my ramblings on the latest teaching and scholarship podcast hope it’s at least entertaining and hopefully informative and interesting. Could do deep dive even more on lots of what we covered so if anything piques your interest reach out and I’ll happily chat more on games, free software and design thinking anytime

dctr.pro/2lx

Some people might be following the development of nodenogg.in which is awesome. Thank you. I thought I would give you all the current status of the project, as I’ve been a little quiet while wrapping up semester in my day job running Games Design & Art at WSA.

I have to prioritise writing up the project and creating other materials to present my research for my PhD submission this should be completed in two phases.

Phase 1

The thesis text completed by the end of the summer (Oct) revisions requested from then followed by creation of rich media to show of the project itself.

Phase 2

Fix any text revision requests and book 2 external supervisors for the viva likely first half 2022.

This means however at the moment the alpha build of the nodenogg.in software itself is not getting much attention and the beta Vue 3 (re)build is on pause.

However the positives are I really want to be using specific features of nodenogg.in for Semester 1 (Oct 2021) so I need to do some focussed work and in Jan 2022 there is potential to start building a new view related to podcasts which includes costings for a real JavaScript developer not me just hacking around.

Some of the associated media and writing will also outline approaches to Ed tech for higher education tools which I hope will also give people pause for thought.

I am hoping to post a few more YouTube videos as well soon however I am also taking a stay at home holiday as I am pretty burnt out.

Such a good newsletter from @epilepticrabbit@mastodon.social this week

This quote from it is excellent;

It is productive to slow down, tend the garden and watch the bees. It’s productive to contemplate and find solidarity with the rest of the life on this planet. It is productive to just be, not consuming, just searching for acceptance from those who accept you as you are.

I am sitting in the garden reading this, well I am sat in the shanty town style lobster shack looking over my garden swimming pool, yeah I know living the dream. I am enjoying the sun and slowly plodding through my SaneNews mailbox listening to a Zero 7 created radio Apple Music mix. The only distraction is my mother in law texting me to ask where I am and when will I sit with her and watch TV, she doesn’t appreciate why I really don’t like watching TV. Oh well she needs company. I told her 5 more minutes. Replies “Thank Goodness xx”

I often suffer from the idea that I am not being productive or as productive as I think I could be, like many I expect and just as Laura states. For me I think a lot of this is because I expriement a lot, and I mean a lot, with ideas and those experiments don’t tend to lead to specific tangible outcomes but they do transform my thinking and future paths of discovery, and what I then share and discuss with others, so I leave a trail of code, notes, browser tabs in my wake that some find very strange and some have even commented on the impressive prolific output, as I try and share as much as I can openly, on repos, blogs etc. It’s semi interesting just writing this as the part time PhD I am completing, I keep saying this so it comes true, however the PhD itself is about a contribution to knowledge (to pass on) and I often wonder how much I demonstrate the tangible impact of my passing on, but I know the conversations and posts are doing that, and I don’t need any crappy tracking to know.

I’ve also done all the productive type things and am a little systems driven so I have all the apps… I am not sure why sometimes, but I don’t tend to not get things done, this last year is the first time I have ever had to ask for extra time for a few work related tasks and I think the global pandemic and work from home (WFH) are very connected to this. It’s been a hard year for numerous reasons personally and globally.

I did however very much enjoy the RESET course I did this year and need to revisit all the materials again as they made a lot of sense and it was all about being yourself which chimes with Lauras newsletter.

Well that was longer than expected, I mainly wanted to shout out Lauras newsletter.

Read the letter and why not get Laura a Coffee as a thank you.

My tbc thesis (practice based part time PhD) I cover off problems about open source and why I made my research project FLOSS not OSS or public domain.

This article goes further than what I was attempting to do. I explain by deconstructing the open source.org criteria that this causes conflicts with enriching the overall software eco system and here this article starts to see wider problems discussing the eco system working as extraction.

The author mentions a conversation about FLOSS in 2000 and quotes Bob Hughes

Capitalism will always find a way to exploit common resources. It’s just a matter of time.

I don’t think this means the conclusion is proprietary software but the fact that much of the software infrastructure isn’t “actually” paid for is a call for concern. More to think about.

dctr.pro/2lp via @ParadeGrotesque@mastodon.sdf.org from @aral@mastodon.ar.al

In the background I am rebuilding nodenogg.in in Vue 3 from the ground up and with some of my new branding… putting it on the beta channel as it will take the learning from alpha to have a stable base, allowing alpha to the kick into next gear of experimentation, timelines undefined atm but the beta page will be very limited in term of functionality if any for a while. I want to get a few pieces better in terms of code organisation, overall human experience and human Interface touches before I add back in real logic that underpins nodenogg.in. beta.nodenogg.in - I am putting it on beta as it will be the next stage from the alpha in terms of experience and architecture but alpha will still be progressing a little over the next 6 months and will be the only place to test the new pieces I want to finish for alpha however as I said beta will be a different build process all from my own learnings on alpha… plus subscribed to vue mastery for a year at least to get up to speed on Vue 3 best practice then beta will be the stable channel and duplicated over to alpha for more developments …. its quite exciting…

hey @aral@mastodon.ar.al sorry was connecting some dots.. in that shouldn’t government be funding things that protect our human rights… aka small tech etc. etc. and is anyone making that suggestion to them… maybe not even as you states Sir Tim Berners-Lee has to create a new LTD company.. and take VC money… yet CERN… also Adam Wiggins talks about new ways to imagine the new Bell Labs etc… discursive.adamprocter.co.uk/2021/01/2… <- off the cuff post

Snuck into end of small tech conversation with a small topic (not! whoops) but as discussion was on funding alternative technologies looking at public bodies I was again wondering if an angle of attack might be back to considering if we understand that we as humans have to have access to the web / connected devices and thus they are a human right in themselves and yet the makers of most technology Google / Facebook etc. don’t respect our human rights in a digital space, that the owner of the data in the first instance must be yourself and the right not to share anything should be the default, who is convincing governments to look at this from a human right POV and then how could that approach unlocking funding of the technology we humans have to use.

Snippet from draft thesis; for contex

William Playfair, considered the founder of graphic representation of statistics and inventor of the line graph, bar chart, pie chart and circle graph states;

As knowledge increases amongst mankind, and transactions multiply, it becomes more and more desirable to abbreviate and facilitate the modes of conveying information from one person to another, and from one individual to many. (Playfair, 1786)

So how could the way we convey, make and represent the information generated and presented to this community of practice have a direct impact on what is made. I will argue that what is made is directly effected by the systems we use within this environment and demonstrate this through research, a series of interventions and experiments that have been undertaken during 2016 through to 2020 within this community. I will then discuss the considerations such interventions digital tool makers and those that use them must urgently consider in order to respect the augmentation of ourselves. Aral Balkan renowned digital rights activist states;

Once we understand that we extend our selves with technology and that our technology and data lie within the boundaries of the self, then we must insist that the constitutional protections of the self that we have enshrined within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and implemented within our myriad of national laws are extended to protect the cyborg self.(Balkan, 2017)

A quick note on technology used in nodenogg.in (alpha). Detailed explanations on choices will be forthcoming in thesis.

• Vue.js
• PouchDB & CouchDB
• IPFS (interplanetary file system)

Code Repository (Gitlab)

Tonight The School of Design starts its series of talks for 2021 members ! You are able to attend one free talk if you are not a member yet, but I suggest you will want to snap up joining at the insanely low £95 a year as you will get access to some amazing resources to level up your design chops, I also know spaces are limited.

Disclaimer @mrmurphy is a good friend of mine and I have worked with him and am a paid School of Design member.

The talk tonight is a subject I am excited about as Jordan Moore will be talking about his work

“exploring the rapidly emerging ‘networked notes’ movement (also referred to as the ‘second brain’ movement), powered by tools like Roam Research, Obsidian and TiddlyWiki.”

Jordon is also building a tool for thought, which I feel has more similarities with nodenogg.in (my tool), makespace.fun, kinopio.club and muse which focus a little more on spatial UI and delight over Roam and other use of force directed graphs and backlinks text, so I am excited to hear his insights.

Read more and sign up at The School of Design

Here is a clip from the tool Jordon has been making

Fixed the iOS issue ! The issue was having the html5 attribute autofocus on the nodes, this wasn’t doing anything as I have a vue directive now to focus on the right element when creating a new node, my guess is that as the elements loaded in, iOS was trying to autofocus as each one “loaded” which sent it into a death spin??! Purely guessing. Other browsers must have suppressed or ignored this, that was a royal pain to work out as it only crashed on device and web inspector (iOS device connected to mac / safari) gave no more information, here is a little video on nodenogg.in 0.1.48 with the new speedy focus to create ideas (nodes) really fast and the insession card sorting - www.youtube.com/watch

The great thing about iterating on nodenogg.in openly is you can get instant feedback. I’m currently re-factoring the node loop code (there is a wider performance issue related to looping through pouchdb / state arrays) and I knew the logic could potentially reintroduce a sync chase bug I had previously squashed however it wasn’t clear as it is a different implementation and it has to do with vues reactivity so in my own testing I couldnt see the bug but when your testing something that is multi player it’s really hard to test. For this test and most other I basically have to have two different machines open and type one handed on each machine at the same time. So I decided I’d put the small update online as it was part of a bigger update and I knew that if this had the bug the next update would be worse as pulling that bug across to the main spatial view would see the bug magnified 10x and fantastically guess what I got in some feedback telling me - typing is slow and skips letters - aka the bug! I have thought about having an alpha site and a beta site but that would segment the people and would also mean I won’t get such instant feedback. Rolled back site to previous version and working on reimplementing bug fix in new code.

Not quite sure how to word this prediction but padlet may have seen a down turn before the pandemic but it’s data mining free account luring will no doubt see more Universities and Colleges suckered into another shiny edutech purchase / subscription. All I can say is more due diligence is needed when picking tech. I do however fundamentally believe a spatial tool such as padlet has so many supportive options and opportunities for staff and students particularly in the area of design thinking and co-creation else I wouldn’t have been researching and making what is now becoming nodenogg.in for almost 6 or so years. If you happen to have been playing with padlet (Miro, mural, milanote) at a University or College recently please feel free to get in touch as I would love to hear more about how you have used padlet and what worked and what didn’t.

A good friend of mine said “Hey I really want to big up your thing but I think you need to show what makes it different to say padlet etc….”

Miro 155 employees $76 million funding

Mural 316 employees $143 million funding

Padlet 18 employees (and declining ) $12.7 million funding

nodenogg.in 1 person & 2 friends (very occasionally)

No funding

🤣 and that’s not what even makes it different

nodenogg.in is free / libre open source software, built in the open, inclusive by design, private by design, humane centred by design, delightful by design, intuitive and decentralised by design.

Built with 💛 using open web tech HTML, CSS, Javascript, Pixijs (webGL), Vue.js, PouchDB and CouchDB.

nodenogg.in is a messy serendipitous co-creation space to play and tinker around with ideas together (in realtime).

Explainer video v0.1.24

mock image of future visuals differs to current version 0.1.24

I probably need to blog about this properly but as a maker of a a “tool for thought” with a particular angle a spatial human computer interfaces (since 2014 😉) and Edutecg, I am very aware of all the recent huge VC investments in Miro ($50 million) Roam etc. ($9+ million / $200 million dollar valuation)

These Digital tools for sharing ideas are suddenly seen as one of the panaceas within our new lockdown life’s.

Miro is profitable and growing, with over 5 million users and 20,000 paying customers, including 80% of the Fortune 100.

(Roam) have still managed to become one of the fastest companies in history to reach $1 million in annual recurring revenue. (Possible only 6000 users)

(Brackets by me)

It’s clear these huge investments are about getting more people to that one service by using that money to add more features from other platforms or to draw all the experts to one place (Roam Makers programme) and in most cases surveil the people’s data even if there are paying or not. All in the hope that they come out of this owning “the tool” to rule all tools.

My tool is for small groups of people to work together to support each other in thinking through an idea. There are no user accounts and there is no centralised service. The code is free libre and you can reach out to me or build your own. I don’t hold “office hours” to win over academics or onboard new customers. I simply talk to people who might have an idea to make the web app work better for them. Small tech that works for and is open (libre) to people is the way forward not tech with millions of users and monopoly dominance, that way only leads to the power balance continuing to tip to the corporations. You’ve all seen Bladerunner right?

Also Cory Doctorow evidences this much better me.

Need to get some more writing on researchnot.es ans feel free to look at alpha.adamprocter.co.uk

Nice I needed more space to reply to your nice mention and thanks for the links, the flow chart one I will certainly look at, one for research and two because I was looking for a tool like that.

@humanetech@mastodon.social @dajbelshaw yes makes sense when I was looking at the list, was wondering about an education or learning section, as one of the problematics I hope to help continue to expose (in the text part of my PhD) is the infiltration of surveillance into education tech by default and why this is not humane - @audreywatters has written much more on this than me mind hackeducation.com - my project is certainly much like a FOSS miro but the design is specifically aimed to work in augmenting a education art/design studio co-creation process, a key factor I have found in testing and working with students over the last 15+ years is that when working together in this way unlike every screen shot on miros site it works best when contribution are anonymous, this may not last in the session, as working with small groups (up to 25) people can identify themselves or it may becomes obvious but it enables a flattening of hierarchy and reduces some of the anxiety of having to “look good” in front of your peers and tutors, which in turn results in better exploration of an idea. We have also ised nodenogg.in a number of times to open up dialog just prior to a presentation or deadline which also had surprising anxiety reduction benefits, this is all being documented in the PhD text

Another little update today on nodenogg.in (alpha 0.1.20) - after fixing IPFS and adding improved mobile view in 0.1.19 I then removed IPFS debug stuff I left in by mistake & tweaked up some of the initial z-index creation of nodes which is a simple nice edit. Connection button is back visible but not ready for action and I Added a help microcosm & which will be included in some rejigging of the onboarding flow next - which is mainly about content flow to be fair, with some minimal hardcoded changes although I should make that piece dynamic asap anyway. nodenogg.in

As most people should know I am working on a practice based PhD (my research for now) that revolves around open practice researchnot.es and making, testing the Free Open Source Software project I have been building for supporting specific co-creation activities in design education/practice, nodenogg.in. At the start of this year the faculty suggested I could get a laptop as part of my PhD, although I am in faculty, and so I have a machine for work (MacBook Pro 2019) but I do also pay half my fees so I jumped at the chance at the potential for some other hardware. This wasnt quiet the case and I had to use some of my internal “kick back” funds to pay but after a long delay, however the machine arrived today. There was lots of reasons for the delay checking funding, covid etc but the big piece and the only reason I needed any additional hardware was the was also getting sign of to be able to install a Linux Distribution on University supplied hardware, I had to sign off that I would not want support and agreement for my webscience and design PhD supervisors that it was a legit request. University process is painful sometimes !

Due to numerous aspects of my research work - open, ethical, inclusive and delightful. I had gotten to the point where needed to properly consider, understand and undertake development on the open platform of Linux and also I wanted to use Pop!_ OS which was a Linux distribution that looked to have been working on UX /UI for a while, Aral Balkan and Doug Belshaw had mentioned it a number of time. I had thus previously run Pop! on a VMware but I didn’t really use it as it was a VM and I was already on my main machine running macOS. I had attempted a simular approach with a USB-C SSD drive hooked to my mac but that didnt work. I knew I needed seperate hardware that I could use as a main machine to really test out.

I had not asked for any specific hardware just something that would run the Pop! system. So today a Dell Latitude Intel i5 8th Gen 1.60GHz , 8GB ram, 500gb SSD, intel, Radeon 540X Series graphic 14" laptop arrived at my house (we now have home delivery due to covid-19), I was in meetings most of the day so my wife took the parcel in. I messaged the IT team to check if I needed to do anything special to install another OS, this unfortunatly meant they had to come back and turn of the BIOS password, I couldnt even log into the system with the Universiry field machine set up anyway.

Ok with the BIOS disabled I used Etcher.io to put the live OS onto a USB stick, this was hurdle one as my mac had not been set to allow this app to have the right level permissions to mount and unmount disks, I ended up running the App via sudo from terminal which forced the issue, I suspect I could have just edited security settings in Preferences but the error was not very clear it was a permission issue. The writer process has quit unexpectedly.

Once permissions where updated the USB stick was ready. I plugged this in to the Dell and duck duck go searched USB boot Dell to find out how to chooise a boot device, which advised pressing f12, the Pop! website had I read on said laptops would use f1 or f7, which was not the case. f12 worked but I checked this twice as to make sure I was seeing the USB device as it appeared twice in the list. So I selected the USB stick and it restarted followed by small white text on the background which said “You need to load the kernel first” and nothing happened. I searched this error and it seemed I needed to turn of secure boot, I had seen this was on previously. I was happy to edit the bios settings and so disabled secure boot, which did also sent me on a bit of a deadend reboot once when it tried to restarted into the pre installed windows, this was not allowed and I entered something called BitRecovery. Which was a little concerned as it was asking for codes and I was worried I would lock myself out but I managed to navigate a reboot and get back into the f12 boot and tried again.

This time I was presented with the test or install Pop message and a reboot count down. The screen the went blank and stayed blank, I waited and waited as I assumed it maybe slow from the USB stick but nothing happened. A further search suggested it maybe to do with UEFI bios mode and that I should switch to legacy boot mode, this option was not present but I noticed on the offical pop install screenshots it said UEFI so I concluded it must be something else. I was concerned my GPU was prehaps not supported, and there was a lot of talk about rufus mode (no idea). I then found a post that had another line that advised when you see the visual test and install Pop prompt you should press the letter e and the following line should say gfxpayload=text. When I entered the special e location I saw gfxplayload=keep, I edited this and hit Ctrl-X. This time after counting down the reboot displayed line after lines of thinking happening and then the install screen appeared … progress!

Pop then installed no problem, I didnt encypt the drive, the setup was simple to follow and I was worried about the keyboard as I am very use to @ being on the number 2, and was plesantly suprised I could pick UK machintosh keyboard layout and test it out, as my muscle memory is going to struggle anought with CTRL over CMD, I might see if I can remap some other options, Super (the “windows” key) + / for search for example is testing my cmd + space to open alfred however I set up my user no problem and a little later on I was promoted for some dell/ system updates including firmware update to 1.7.5 which I think suggested I can enable Secure Boot again (not sure why I need it yet mind).

Firefox was preinstalled and so I logged into my Firefox account which was great. I then opened the Pop!_ Shop to install VSCode and others, I searched and installed VSCode but it wasnt the official one so that was confusing, but easily rectified. I then went to get Obsidian and both files I downloaded a snap and an appimage didnt just install either like an exe or like macOS (drag and drop from an disk image), It offered to search the store but turned up no results, I then looked online to install GitKraken which also offered a number of installs again this was confusing too but it also said Snap Store, so I decided that this store might be the best approach, I was then able to use terminal to install snap and the then desktop snap store,at first I didnt think the snap desktop store had installed but a restart, as advised in one guide fixed this, and enabled me to install Gitkraken and an Apple Music client (a browser wrapper, althought it also asked to installa DRM app and yet didnt work for play back, but neither did logging in via firefox)

The obsidian snap app was not on the store and when I tried to use terminal to install I was presented with a warning error: cannot find signatures with metadata for snap, so another search later and I added the line –dangerous and it installed. I also installed Syncthing from the Pop Shop. This added a folder called Sync, I went to check out the webpage which also suggests installing a GTK, GUI for Syncthing, the Pop Shop had this but again like the unofficial VS Code it is labeled as flathub flatpak, I searched the store again and found the Debian build? It seems to be working. I have to connect my two devices now my mac and Pop! I want to do this so I can use Obsidian to write on both machines. I will do some testing again conflicting files as well as I know Obsidian are looking to launch there own sync service but that is not out yet and another monthly subscription. I installed Filezilla, last on my to do although, Apple Music was a diversion, and needs fixing / deleting and Iam a little concerned about the extra thing it installed, I did download Discord as I think I will want to connect that but only to my own discord.

I keep rolling my mouse to the left to get the activities dock to appear, on macOS my dock is visible on the left, and I need to work out how to “hide” windows. Of to read up on the shortcuts, so far seems very nice and the machine itself seem nice to use and the screen although not retina is bright and clear. Spellcheck in firefox doesnt seem to be working in the micro.blog web posting text area.

Most of the above wasnt painful but it wasnt seemless and installing apps was a little triicky if not in the Pop Shop and installing the Snap Shop involved terminal. If I was buying a machine I would look at the Pinebooks, I have not read up if they work with Pop, I should expect so.

n.b Apple Music started worked CONTENT_EQUIVALENT error was an Apple issue, will work out if the extra DRM thing for Apple Music is bad or not at some point.

So during lock down and my Easter holiday I’ve been glued to my computer working on PhD stuff (my wife has not been happy) and I’ve mainly been doing project stuff (don’t tell my supervisors) so I am close to another wicked phase of design and development as we move to ‘living on’ version 0.2.0. I also did a number of other exciting foundation work today so to get yourself listed as a supporter ASAP just head to nodenogg.in and tap the support link and show you were here from day one (well ok technical there have been a lot of days but I won’t hold that against you!) by supporting for as little as £1 per month you will be onboard one of the revolutionary products that will rise very much so after COVID-19. 💥 🤯

Ok - now this should show up with Feed Title and Post Title - PhD Discording !

This is a difficult bug to consider but going to post here and then log in the system… the remote CouchDB has died but the server is up so when trying to connect the 502 gateway error causes a CORS errors. But you can still proceed into nodenogg.in (as its PouchDB) and works offline. I can test this by going offline and entering a microcosm but now it seems the list and spatial views do not update visually so you cant see your data. If you go back online and wait the page will update, the data will sync and nothing was lost and all your notes captured and visible, but not being able to see the local copy is wrong now. Shows how robust the offline mode is but I must be showing the wrong data set now or something.

Yesterday … Meeting with my design based PhD Supervisor and you tell him all the cool stuff you’ve been building which doesn’t sounds that cool when you say it out loud and of course he mentions the thing you had put off all day as you built the “vital” reader view component “I really want to see your writing on this stuff” and so the next morning you decide that you must in fact properly start writing up the number of testing sessions already undertaken now direct to my researchnot.es blog and then you spend half the morning trying to work out why your wordpress wont connect to your discourse properly. I wonder if this is how Manton has been feeling about his book too, cant wait till its out though… just saying! Wordpress, Discourse all working now so I am getting there, first post in a while has gotten quite technical but I think worth dipping into with each post even on the usage testing front, as the choices are very much human centred.

Stephen Downes is always finding great stuff and has a knack to see aross disciplines and see how together new things may form. In his latest publication A Look At The Future Of Open Educational Resources towards the end he states;

Third and finally, designers and developers will need to learn to co-create cooperatively. This is not the same as collaboration, where small or large teams work on a certain product or outcome. Cooperative work involves multiple individuals and groups working within a common environment or infrastructure, and helping support that network or infrastructure for mutual benefit, while working on different objectives or outcomes.

Part of this involves building and sharing resources in common. But an equally large part of it involves being able to work in the open, or as it is sometimes called, ‘open working’. Examples exist in, say, the philosophy of ‘open science’, where “many of the benefits envisaged for open methods relate to how far they enable not only access but active participation in a research community by newcomers and outsiders, and maintain low barriers to this participation.” Internships, co-op student placements, apprenticeships and sport development leagues all embody the same principle.

These ambitions chime so squarely with my practice based PhD nodenogg.in, it made me very Happy.

Micro.blog is an inspiration for a one person dev team

I realised that the interactive demo was more useful than I realised, I think on the site sitejs.org the first block of text should mirror the interactive demo, for people like me I kinda skipped it, or make the interactive demo more obvious and prominent. With the text clearly indicating the advanced features.

So now to sync thing up, I watched the demo a few more times and think I might have an idea, at first I was worried that I needed to run Site.js on my server but I don’t think I do if that’s just the remote end point. So now to work out my remote SSH log in as I normally land in via root or use SFTP.

Off to Plesk and searching to see if I can create a new SSH user straight into my new domain I couldn’t see that as an option, a stack overflow advised to get into the right place do the following;

ssh -t user@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx "cd /directory_wanted ; bash"

This worked for me to get to the right place but I am not sure if the –sync-to method would take that and what about the user.

Ok so tried

site --sync-to=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx "cd /var/www/vhosts/myvps.location.co.uk/nodenogg.in ; bash"

I got a helpful error which said Error 127: Rsync not found; please run site enable –sync

Ok trying to enable sync next.

👿 Sorry, daemons are only supported on Linux systems with systemd (systemctl required).

Blast. Thats a show stopper.

So I decided to take a look at the html file, maybe I should just copy that over but it was very very barebones, aka no structure just the one line I added.

Hmm so my conclusion at this point.

The advantages of Site.js will (I think) only come into play if I am running Site.js both locally and then copying or syncing to the remote which is also running Site.js otherwise I am just copying a plain html file to be server up via in my case Plesk/Apache. This will need more investigation as I will need to install and run Site.js on my VPS and then I suspect redirect requests for my new domain to said place using nginx, I do this for a couple of other services but I need to refresh my brain 🧠 on how to do this. Read the final part of this brief look at the first release of one part of the tech from The Small Technology Foundation. Part 4

Previous instalments

• Part one here
• Part two here

So I’ve scratched out my first round of design principles for nodenoggin. Next up make some posters for the principles. Would welcome feedback or comment at discourse.adamprocter.co.uk 🦉 or via micro.blog mentions 👍

Delight.

Support delightful design, the people feel good and empowered. Must be intuitive to empower the user. (test, test, test)

Knowledge connecting.

Build knowledge together making connections you would not find without others.

Serendipity.

Enable the collective to wander and get lost in the journey to find solutions or ideas that would at first seem totally unconnected.

Augment.

Must extend the physical act of being in a space solving design problems and seeking knowledge and ideas with others.

Collaborative.

Enhance and support the collective. The collective is always better than the individual.

Reflective.

The tool allows for reflective practice and review outside of working with others.

These next principles are overarching and need a little more work I believe but I also want to keep them as simple as possible.

Free software.

All the source must be free software as in free speech and open for anyone to see, use and change.

Open web.

The web is important and should not be driven by data theft and adverts.

Privacy.

Respect the person and their data at all times. Their data is first on their devices. Sync does not take away ownership and does not store data that cannot be controlled by the person whose data it is.

Ethical.

The data belongs to the people, never hold the keys to other peoples data. They choose how to share, delete and must be able to export.

Inclusive

Design for everyone.

I do like the opening 2 paragraphs for all day teaching platform event I am attending today.

Whether it be through collaboration, in a collective or as part of a cohort, the practices of making are never without context and commonly not undertaken alone. We understand that our students are keen to make and work in disciplinary and interdisciplinary networks as this nourishes and supports creative practice, reflecting the fluidity of the professional environment.

Networked making, including writing, is often facilitated by digital connections which allow us to go beyond the physical boundaries of the studio, seminar room or lecture theatre. Yet, while we all ‘work online’ in some form, the practices of networked making are still emerging. The diversity of voices the digital allows us to include and connect encourages us to reconsider our modes of learning and teaching for making.

• www.arts.ac.uk/whats-on/…

Fiddled with slides way too much for my two talks at eLearn19 tomorrow (well technically today now!) hope they both make some sense;

1. Slack as a tool to extend community of practice into the digital based on using it within Games Design & Art for the last 4 years

2. Spatial hypertext , sneak peak into more on more practice based PhD and hopefully awareness + community building

It was with great sadness that I was informed that Ashok Ranchhod had passed away on January the 3rd 2019. I didn’t know Ashok outside of work but he was a kind, funny and interesting person. Ashok had been at the School of Art since 2011.

Ashok was really an unsung hero of the BA (Hons) Games Design & Art programme.

Ashok was a staff member that was always present at our events and was always up for providing feedback on student projects, he loved to get involved and played all the games we showcased over the last few years.

Ashok was a regular contributor to the programme since its inception giving specialist talks around gamification and the history of games along with popping by the studios to discuss student projects. Ashok was also very involved in the PhD work of two of the current staff team within Games alongside a lot of work he did in relation to the Games Design Hub and Serious Gaming Hub which connected the staff team and students to different projects in computer science, healthcare and more.

However what would not be obvious is that if it wasn’t for Ashok the BA (Hons) Games Design & Art programme would not be here today. The original team that worked on creating the programme in 2013 included Ashok, Gary Wills, James Stallwood and a number of industry advisors, the industry advisors where all contacts via Ashok. My main role was to work out what a current games programme would need from all these inputs and to pull together the programme documentation and design the curriculum. It was Ashok that represented the new programme at the validation panels and supported connections within Computer Science and without his action at these panels, the programme may never have been given the green light.

Ashok’s connections within the Games industry, Serious Gaming and Gamification gave gravitas to the programme documentation. The initial membership with TIGA and a number of the guests within the programme come from Ashok’s connections specifically in the first year he organised guests that included Rod Cousens.

I am aware that Ashok has spoken highly of the programme both internally and externally and that numerous contacts we now have would not have been without Ashok. I suspect many opportunities for the programme have come from the work Ashok did on our behalf, both directly and indirectly. If it was not for Ashok’s support and help I would not be leading a successful Games Design & Art programme, I love my work and the programme we run here so for this I am eternally grateful.

For the revalidation of the programme in 2017/18 Ashok wrote for us a brand new module The Business of Games, something the programme really needed, the module will run in the 2019/20 Academic year. I can’t believe he will not be here to deliver it. Ashok will be missed in more ways that he may have known.

This year we lost one of the GDA Family.

You can donate towards cancer research in Ashok’s name and read more about his life here

1. Image of Ashok Ranchhod
2. Image of Ashok user testing board games in 2017
3. Image of Ashok in the Games Studio with students 2018

Manifold, is a hybrid publishing platform created by the U of Minnesota Press and CUNY’s Graduate Centre with features supporting experimental scholarly work. The platform is designed to support digital humanities publishing and is experimenting with future publishing models, there is a lot planned for the platform and version 2 is already doing some great stuff.

However more than just an announcement about this platform, I think and hope you will be excited to see my PhD content as I publish it live on my own Manifold instance - manifold.soton.ac.uk

This week I have launched the service and reading is open access plus you now have the ability to interact with my texts via highlights and comments, these interactions are public and require you to create an account. Please feel free to share with others who you think will enjoy the text content and this process of open scholarship.

Some more background on Manifold. www.insidehighered.com/news/2017… manifoldapp.org

I applied for this but didn’t make the shortlist https://simplysecure.org/underexposed/

Here is the application information as submitted, for reference. Even though I didn’t make it this year I am excited to see the projects and the work that is produced! They had a high level of applicants. Plus in general they have lots of great resources and writing on the website anyway https://simplysecure.org/

Application

I am undertaking a part time practice based PhD to create a digital prototype platform and manifesto to enhance knowledge building around design education practice. The main goal of the platforms design is to extend collaborative learning and communities of practice from the physical across to the digital. The platform will be free software and decentralised.

The platform will be designed to support a collaborative interface and workflow that grows and changes through human input. A fluid, adaptable tool, driven by the community of practice. This tool would replace the institutional controlled Learning Management System (such as Blackboard / Moodle)

The LMS (Learning Management System), the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) or MLE (Managed Learning Environment) are at the heart of all educational institutional mechanisms and are intended to support teaching and learning. However these platforms result in the support and extension of the administrative needs of an institute. They also support the outdated mode of Sage on the stage, tutor as expect process, rather than work with the Learning network and the power of the group they do not encourage collaborative knowledge building and creative connections.

Technology is ever present in the studios and classrooms of education and like a number of sectors we are at a point where we must decide if the future model for education is surveillance and data akin to a proximate Silicon Valley model or if Edutech has a future based around open practice, specific pedagogy and the needs of the tutors and students?

I believe we need to make the alternatives to the surveillance capitalism we see across technology and my focus is on a platform for knowledge building around practice based design processes, linked to design thinking and creative investigation.

I currently run the BA (hons) Games Design & Art programme at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and am about to start the building phase for my PhD after an initial research phase. I have the basis for the platform set up utilising primarily open web tech including Vue.js and Couch.db, next steps revolve around data decentralisation, full encryption, data visualisation and data manipulation, user testing with design students

A short explainer of the research can be seen in this video here. Youtube

A fundamental factor for the project is the decentralisation of knowledge building. The platform would allow users to control and share their data via the resources being distributed and decentralised. All the current systems for education are institutional paper-replicating, top down, folder based, centralised hierarchical approaches or students own digital Personal Learning Networks (PLN) silos and does not work for knowledge sharing and building and is outdated.

My current research question is :

How could we undertake collaborative knowledge building within design education using human centred design processes to create digitally augmented ways of managing and engaging with knowledge?

I want (and need) to build a community around the project itself and to get more points of view and contribution to support the project. I am also keen to meet other people working towards similar ambitions to build better technology for people.

Ah darn it no joy for MozFest either.

Due to the high level of submissions, we’re unable to accept all proposals and unfortunately, your session was not part of the final group.

I have to admit the excuse high volume doesn’t cut the mustard with me really, either my proposal was good enough or it wasn’t. Clearly it was not strong enough and if there was less applications then I would hope this would still be the case.

All being well I’ll be attending one day at MozFest this year but not running my workshop. Hopefully see some of you there. Work carries on with the project, more to do and more to improve clearly.

This is one hardest areas I’ve been trying to tackle to be frank for far too long

In theory my PhD will contain the delightful design manifesto

top level thoughts atm

• native digital actions
• micro-interactions
• anticipate the human
• highly intuitive
• humanity centred design
• ethical

I know at least that rule number 1 is never call a human a user. Plus just found out the awesome @fehler is also producing a book called “Designing Delightful Experiences”! Awesome see mrmurphy.com I will certainly be chatting to him ASAP ! 📚 🎓 #procterphd

Below is my session proposal for MozFest feel free to discuss on my forum and view at Mozilla github

What space do feel your session will best contribute to?

Decentralisation

Is there an alternate space your session could contribute to?

Openness

What is the name of your session?

CODENAME : NodeNoggin

What will happen in your session?

A short presentation will introduce NodeNoggin and its purpose as a knowledge sharing platform designed to extend the physical design thinking processes from the confines of the physical studio to include a new type of collaborative digital space.

Working in small groups we will run a design thinking activity using the theme of decentralisation in the form of a physical post-it note ‘ idea generation workshop’ combined with the use of an early Minimum Viable Product of NodeNoggin.

NodeNoggin has a delightful and intuitive interface. It allows people to engage, connect and unpack knowledge in meaningful data visualisations and filters that enhance design thinking processes and create a meaningful shared collaborative environment to support and augment the design process.

What is the goal or outcome of your session?

The simple goal is to showcase a very early new open source platform and spatial interface designed to help design thinking processes and knowledge production. NodeNoggin attempts to encompass delightful humanity centred design principles, and hopes to take a slice of Edutech away from Silicon Valley, we are building a digital tool that is owned by the content creators and knowledge workers.

This workshop is a real world test of NodeNoggin. However the ambition of the session is to facilitate community building around NodeNoggin, both in terms of visibility but also in terms of building advocates from within the Mozilla community who may want to provide future feedback, discussion and code contributions as the project develops.

After the festival, how will you and your participants take the learning and activities forward? (max 120 words)

Our open ethos on the project means we will be documenting the process as much as possible and a community is something we feel the NodeNoggin must have. In preparation we have already set up an open discussion forum , youtube channel, a gitlab instance and repo’s alongside project blogs, podcast and a newsletter. We will be asking for participants to specifically follow the project, join the open spaces and spread the word to help support and improve the platform. We plan to run numerous tests of NodeNoggin specifically within Design teaching environments and so will be running future sessions and enabling participants to download and run NodeNoggin themselves for their own design projects.

• researchnot.es
• discourse.adamprocter.co.uk
• gitlab.adamprocter.co.uk

How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session? What if 30 participants attend? What if there are 3? (max 120 words)

We would require at least 3 participants as the session will be a design thinking exercise using both NodeNoggin and paper and pens. If over 30 arrive this will be fine as we can group people together to form teams to work the design solutions and knowledge collection. The workshop should also provide food for though on the subject of decentralisation and be of wider benefit

We have yet to test NodeNoggin in a live environment and so the number of live connections could be an issue and so we may to set a limit. The platform would hopefully at this point run as a mesh network. Participants would want a live web connection to enhance the research process.

Choose from the formats below that most suits your session delivery

Learning Forum

How much time you will need?

90mins

I would very much encourage discussion on my application here

Mozilla Fellowship Application 2018

Fellowship Focus Area:

Open Science

Personal website (url):

discursive.adamprocter.co.uk

Linkedin (url):

www.linkedin.com/in/procte…

Twitter (url):

www.twitter.com/adamproct…

Github or other code repository profile (url):

gitlab.adamprocter.co.uk

How did you hear about the fellowship?

Friend

Who?

Doug Belshaw (ex Mozilla)

Do you know any Mozilla staff or current or past Mozilla fellows and/or did they recommend you apply? If so, who and in what context?

Laura Hilliger, Jess Klein and John Bevan. Doug sent me the call and recommended I apply. I worked on a digital humanities (PORTUS) project with John helping facilitate its design direction.

What specific skills can you bring to the fellowship? (ie: web development, subject matter expertise, research, etc) :

A broad range of design and CS skills. I can build apps both in Swift and Javascript. I have used C#, GDScript, PHP, GoLang, Ruby and numerous databases. I use design tools for making and thinking, including Adobe CS, Sketch, Marvel app and currently build with Vue.js and Snap.svg and RT databases.

Project proposal: What is project you would like to pursue during your fellowship?

My proposal is to create the platform and interface for a free software, decentralised, P2P, spatial hypertext tool deployable within creative education settings.The platform is designed to support a collaborative interface that grows and changes through human input. Most VLEs are rigid, static top down tools this is much more fluid, adaptable and driven by the community.

The platform and interface is native to digital culture built on the open web, democratic, human driven, iterative and collaborative. A visualised and spatial network of connections and clusters provide an innovative, accessible and delightful way to create and decode data, empowering individuals to connect ideas and build knowledge within communities of practice. The purpose of the tool’s design is to extend collaborative learning and communities of practice from the physical into the digital. The project I am proposing is within part of my PhD but ultimately extends into the final stages of the PhD.

My ambition is not only building the platform and interface but with the backing of the Fellowship I will widen the scope and potential reach of the project itself. The overall ambition of my PhD is to interrogate the Virtual Learning Environment specifically in teaching design education and critically examine current tech business models from Silicon Valley that are being applied to Education, especially that of data collection. To be able to do this I will build a community around the products and manifesto of the PhD and I believe the fellowship would greatly enhance and amplify this ambition. Two other UK HE courses have registered interest in the spatial interface concepts I have been researching and having Mozilla backing would give gravitas to such an engagement.

We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.

The fellowship would support creating and testing a series of prototypes and build the platform via UX feedback, user testing and technology deployment in a way that would not be possible through my own funding. A key component is to create a truly open process, not just in terms of ensuring all the products are free software but that the process of discovery itself is open and creative commons licensed. The fellowship period would be a time to focus on community building, both in terms of technical contribution and userbase. The collaborative nature of creative work means sharing is one of the main principles embedded in the platform and the PhD both in terms of a GNU Affero General Public License and default Creative Commons licensing.

The project is to build a community not just of testers but of makers and thinkers to contribute to the platform and its ambition to support a new creative knowledge building tool. This fellowship will quickly boost the level of impact. This project aims to fix the issue that the digital tools we currently use for design education are broken: they are a replication of the physical office, files and folders. Learning is a collaborative, shared endeavour already embedded in design studio based teaching, but this model doesn’t extend to the digital tools we have. This results in digital personal learning network silos and digital repositories that provide little or no benefit to the best types of collaborative teaching and learning.

Conventional electronic documents were designed in the 1970s by well-funded conventional thinkers at Xerox PARC, who asked, “How can we imitate paper?"

What do you consider to be the biggest threat to the open web in your area of expertise? Why? In what way would the Internet – or the world – be different if this threat were mitigated?

Surveillance Capitalism and The Attention Economy.

Google et al. is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behaviour. this is a surveillance capitalism

The new scarcity in the internet age is attention. Since there is a surplus of information, more information flowing through our society than any of us could ever hope to process or understand, the new bottleneck on our economy is attention. We now live in an attention-based economy

These two concerns are intrinsically connected. The need to keep our attention is being transformed by the surveillance of our data. The web’s arrival ushered in a world where we could collaborate and connect people in ways that had not been imagined. This opened up the possibility for innovation in numerous fields. Projects such as Wikipedia clearly demonstrate the power of the web. The open web democratised many facets of society and asked us to question how our world would be governed and understood. Business models were flipped with new ways of thinking. Innovation appeared in attempts to help us navigate this new landscape and ever-growing wealth of information. Pioneers of the internet foresaw ways in which humans and computers would work together to tackle some of the biggest issues facing the planet yet what the web has become is now purely derived to serve these two issues. Rather than enhancing humankind the web has become adtech; it is being funneled through the view of corporations and their need to sell ads. Facebook claim to use this method to provide free access to all and thus connect people and yet Facebook decides what you see and when. Google claims to organise the wealth of information and yet money drives fake news to the top of search results. We must build alternative tools on the open web that provide ways to connect people, gather knowledge and provide true democracy outside of this neoliberal approach.

Why are you the right candidate for 10 months of self-directed study? Describe your current professional arrangement.

The period is an excellent fit in the next phase of my PhD. I am strongly self-directed, innovative and highly motivated to tackle this project. As a Senior Teaching Fellow I organise and plan my entire work pattern and student timetables​ and have managed many projects to deadline.​ I already have time allocated to my PhD which would be redirected at the fellowship and in place next year additional staffing and a substantially piece of internal administrative work has been completed such that this specific time frame I can given much more time and focus. As outlined in the project, the building of interfaces and testing the platform mean I will also be able to combine my time teaching in the Games Studio at Winchester School of Art with the fellowship itself. This specific open science fellowship would present a unique opportunity to bring together my research with Mozilla’s mission. It represents an excellent, timely synergistic opportunity with significant benefit to both parties.

What are two projects (with URLs) that you are proud of? What did you do on them and why are you proud?

BA (Hons) Games Design and Art - www.southampton.ac.uk/wsa/under…

At Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, I was given the opportunity to lead the development of a new BA (launched Sept 2014). Validation of the BA involved the design of a new curriculum and type of learning. This was a project to create a new course from zero. In conversation with the games industry, HE educators and from my own experience it became clear that a new type of games course needed to be designed, one that was research-led and utilised thinking through making. This ambitious course is now seeing graduates obtain work in emerging games markets that didn’t exist. Students are pushing concepts and challenging the medium, alongside facilitating new ways of thinking around games as cultural objects that can engage social change.

My consultation work prior to my PhD involved helping organisations with digital technology or applying gamification to a process. This work would often culminate in research documentation to advise clients and digital prototypes. Some became finished apps, others purely showcased possible direction, such as multiscreen touch interactions to convey complex data sets, gamification of HR processes, apps for the Cultural Sector and serious games. One highly successful project I am proud to have been engaged with at a very early stage is a project that became Signly.

SIGNLY - signly.co

Signly is an award-winning app which displays pre-recorded sign language videos on a user’s mobile, enabling better access to written content for d/Deaf sign language users.

I was commissioned over a few years to undertake work testing and building various AR based interactions combing various tech. The final concept and idea to marry this tech with sign language content was not my idea, however the work I undertook in both prototyping and consultation had a major influence on the direction of what become Signly.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with us about yourself regarding the Fellowship?

I have been a proponent of open education for the last 15+ years. As a long-time advocate and active participant in open education, both in terms of research projects, writing and discussion both online and at events including MozFest I strive to embed and share open practices within my own teaching and learning. Sites about my work include:

• researchnot.es
• dlls.adamprocter.co.uk
• gitlab.adamprocter.co.uk
• discourse.adamprocter.co.uk

My positioning is to support learning by working enthusiastically and sharing what I find as openly as possible. This video provides an overview of my PhD www.youtube.com/watch

What research field/s are you in?

Very cross disciplinary Design and CS often called Digital Humanities. However here is a link for reference to my related research groups I have active connections with dctr.pro/25y

Describe your current research team.

I don’t have a team (yet)

Describe to us how open science advances your research.

If I have seen further, it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants.

Collaboration is the only effective way to solve problems. The PhD is driving for Humanity Centred Design and the launch of the Delightful Design Manifesto. Delight not just in terms of use but also in terms of ownership - that of the data and the ability to contribute both in terms of feedback but also in ability to change the source code. A Cooperative approach will be required for a Humanity Centred Design process.

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

List and explain briefly any projects you’re leading related to open science.

At this time not beyond my PhD.

What project in the field do you find most inspiring to further science and the web?

The Web Foundation’s strategy of digital equality through ensuring the web stays open and can thus be used to build a more equal world. Various decentralisation projects like Mastodon and movements such as ind.ie coupled with the potential for Blockchain and a P2P Web offering interesting ways to ensure this type of equality and democratisation.

One proposal coming forward in the UK is to lower Arts course fees based on the median wage being lower after graduation. This divide is another out dated mode that tries to split creativity out of the ongoing promotion of STEM.

Having creative graduates, or “graduates of the arts”, pay less for their degrees would create a perception that the subjects they studied are less likely than others to lead to successful careers, which would undervalue the huge economic impact made by the creative industries.

• dctr.pro/24f

I think education should be provided by the state to anyone that wishes to undertake it but a reduction in fees for the Arts only would not only devalues creativity but have a huge impact on our ability to deliver world class education.

I firmly believe that some of the best education comes via the Arts and that creativity is required in all fields. It will only be through creative thinking that many of the worlds problems could be solved.

The Creative industries is the fastest growing sector in the UK and continues to grown faster then the economy, in fact at twice the rate in 2017.

The ongoing UK view that art, design and creativity are less important than other subjects is backwards thinking and will in the long term be hugely damaging to an island that seems even more inclined to cut it self off from the global economy that will need creative and design thinking in all areas.

Disciplines must work together. I have an MA in Art, Design & Internet Techologies and am studying a design part time PhD in Web Science. I see no divide between science, art, design and creativity.

Audio

• MP4 Audio recording from the session.

Links from final slide

• discursive.adamprocter.co.uk - micro.blog
• fragmentum.adamprocter.co.uk - microcast
• researchnot.es – writings
• dlls.adamprocter.co.uk - 12 month report
• periodical.adamprocter.co.uk – newsletter

One of the areas of investigation for my PhD project revolves around spatial user interfaces and connected to this the concept of spatial hypertext. I will be writing in more detail about this however there is little that seems to have advanced in this regard since the mid 2000’s and so I would like to pin down some more current and interesting examples. A key thing is that a spatial interface is not to be confused with a concept map, although there are similarities, a spatial interface is a way to arrange collections of different objects and draw connections between them visually and spatially. I am concerned with a thinking tool to help work out relational information design. Here is a piece on information design I previously wrote.

Two keys texts are the following;

• Marshall, C.C. & Frank M Shipman, I., 1999. Spatial Hypertext: An Alternative to Navigational and Semantic Links. pp.1–5.
• Bernstein, M., 2013. Can We Talk about Spatial Hypertext?, pp.1–10.

However what I am keen to gather in the first instance is more examples of spatial interfaces. Here are my starters.

• Aquanet
• VIKI
• Tinderbox
• Nuclino
• Graph Commons

Please join the discussion here and post any interesting spatial interfaces.

As an aside, Frode Hegland in his web science PhD is also undertaking some work in this field with what he calls liquid views. This is an interactive way to work with a text document as a researcher.

Long day will record PhD microcast report tomorrow morning. Morning mainly not getting Go Lang blog to sort as I want. Midday awesome chat with @dajbelshaw about MoodleNet. More on that soon hopefully! 😊 and then afternoon mainly on delightful design and what it is and why it’s important not to “Nudge” but to empower. Which was hard going on fact.

#procterphd

The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.