Saving the Environment

Google’s decision to turn their homepage black in tribute to Earth Hour’s campain to get people to turn their lights off for an hour was instrumental in spreading the word about the event. Google is one of the most visited websites on the planet, with many millions of impressions every hour. Normally, they would mark an event such as this by changing their logo. But by making the change so obvious, they dramatically raised public awareness about the event in very little time. It wasn’t long before people were asking each other why their favorite search engine was suddenly inverted, and as a result, learning about the campaign. It would be interesting to know just how much of an impact Google has made by doing this.

We Live in a Beautiful World (^yeah we do, yeah we do…^)

Before I started using Flickr, I saw my camera simply as way of capturing images to preserve their memories. Since signing up with Flickr, I see it increasingly as a communication tool, and a form of expression. I’ve always been interested in photography, partly due to my photographer granddad rubbing his influence on me, but I feel Flickr has given life to the images in a way that I’d never considered was possible. They’re no longer static images pinned on my wall, they’re searchable, taggable, geographical-able(!) snapshots of whatever the day has to show me. I appreciate the world so much more, I’m eager to capture the way a lake scatters the sunlight, the texture of a growth of jade-green moss, or the way something as regular as an electricity pylon can look so geometrically beautiful. By sharing these images online, I feel as though I can give others the motivation to look at the world differently, and by looking at the work of some of the professionals, it suddenly hits home to me (as cliche as it sounds) just how beautiful the world really is.

Freeing the People

The situation in Tibet is the most recent of a series of events that would not normally be possible to be publicised. Without the Internet to publicise what has been going on, I’m sure the outlook for the protesters would have been very poor. But with the whole world watching, China has been pressurised to play nicely. Yes, it could be better, but it could be a whole lot worse. Journalists may be banned from entering the area, but these days, everyone can be a journalist. Censorship is also rife, but the Internet is steadily undermining the efforts made by dictatorship governments to stifle the voices of its people.

Spreading the Word

Before web 2.0, news could be spread through the Internet using emails. At the time, this way of communicating was seen as very fast. You could subscribe to a news website and get a daily summary of what’s going on in the world. But by today’s standards, apparently this is not fast or direct enough. People want to know about something as soon as it happens, not as soon as they can get round to checking their emails.
Then came RSS (really simple syndication) which made the delivery of content even faster. It’s like getting lots of little emails about things you want to know. Now people can find out about almost everything they want to know, in the same place, as soon as it happens. But even now, this doesn’t seem fast enough.
Twitter makes it possible for people to get these updates, and updates from their friends, on their mobile. The media whore is no longer chained to their PC. The information is sent to them wherever they are in the world.

Forging Peace

But Twitter is not primarily about receiving news feeds instantly. It’s about the non-journalists, the microbloggers who tell us what they ate for breakfast, what their cat is doing, and what’s pissing them off at that moment in time. So why does this matter? It matters because these people are real. They could be living in Sydney, Paris, Luxemberg, Tokyo or Somalia. So when something happens where these people live, we suddenly care so much more than if it were a place we’d never heard of. It matters because it makes us realise that the world is small, unique place, and what happens in it could affect our friends.

Distributing Aid

It’s all too easy to watch starving children in a faraway place on the news. We’ve become desensitized to the effects of bombs in the Middle East, and it doesn’t seem like our problem. But imagine being able to talk to the people affected by these events. Schools in the UK are encouraged to have video conferences or conversations over the Internet using applications such as Skype with children in schools in Africa, South America and the Far East. The problems don’t seem so distant any more.

For someone working with the Internet every day, sometimes it can be easy to take it for granted. But I try to remember just how special it really is.

My first impression when I unwrapped my shiny 15″ MacBook Pro out of its packaging was how light it felt. I occasionally use my dad’s laptop which is about 5 years old, and it’s very cumbersome. It’s also very noisy and slow! I took it with me on Drew and Rachel’s CSS course, and was very embarrassed by the massive whirring clicking slab I had to use whilst the others in the group all had sleek, elegant Macs which didn’t take half an hour to start-up. My Mac is so quiet that when I turned it off, I had to press my ear against the case to convince myself it wasn’t still on!

Everything about the Mac is designed around the user. Right down to the power cable which is not only magnetic, so pops out if an accident-prone like me trips over the lead, but the box thing that’s attached to the cable has two little legs that pop out to wrap the cord around. The keyboard illuminates and screen brightens when the lighting is poor (which I had fun testing by flicking the lightswitch on and off!) Setting up was a great experience. My wireless Internet was automatically detected, and at the end of the process, the inbuilt camera offers to take a photo for a ‘buddy icon’. I chose a default one instead. (I was having a very bad hair day!)

Despite my affection for my new best friend, there are a few things that I had difficulty with. For example, the keys are slightly different (the @ key is on the 2 key, and some of the buttons have funny shapes on them), but I think I’m already getting used to that. I did have a bit of a blonde moment trying to use iTunes, because I didn’t realise the menu bar across the top changes for each window. And only having one mouse button rather than a left and right one… that’s going to take me a while to get used to.

Most of the software on it seems to be a 30 day trial (including Office for Mac). Microsoft offer a 60 day trial for their Office suite which I am taking advantage of before my ICT coursework is due shortly after Easter. Then I will have no need to use it! But from looking at the Apple site, iWork is something around $45, whereas Microsoft Office is…. too much! So why not just have it pre-installed on the machine?

One of the things that drew me to get a Mac was the Time Machine. This saves frequent backups, and presents them as pages going back in time. Before using Time Machine, I had to delete everything off my drive which was a bit annoying because all my stuff from my PC is on there. I hope it doesn’t mean I can’t use both. I also managed to connect my PC and MacBook wirelessly, and share files… although I messed about with the settings a bit and can’t connect them again. But it was easy enough the first time!

So far, I think it is worth the hours I toiled working at the Juicebar last year and doing design projects to pay for it. I won’t have any money for a while, but I see it as an investment, and I hope it won’t be too long before it starts paying for itself.

The librarian came up to us, and at first we thought we were going to be kicked out for making too much noise. But she seemed to think we were waiting to do “reading club”, where sixth-formers mentor younger years who struggle with literacy. I’m not a mentor, but I thought I’d ‘play along’ and see what would happen.

There was a girl sitting opposite us who had been watching us joke about the Ofsted report. She looked really bored. I asked her who was her mentor and she said she didn’t have one, so I said I’d read with her.

I asked her what subjects she liked, to which she gave me a blank face. “I hate school.”

“Do you like reading?” I asked.

“No… I mean, I don’t like reading to people, I don’t know why.”

I never enjoyed reading to people when I was younger, I guess because I felt embarrassed when I got the words wrong. I asked her if she read the paper, which she said she didn’t.

The library has lots of daily papers including the Sun, the Telegraph and the Guardian, so I brought over the Guardian, and showed her the different sections it had. I then asked her to look at the pages and read me the bits she wanted to read. She seemed happy to have someone to talk to about things that interested her, and I think this really increased her confidence, making her see that reading doesn’t stop at books.

I think the problem with the reading club is that the students see the club as a chore. Perhaps they are even made to feel stupid for having to come, and this can bring down their attitude towards learning. It’s like being forcing a child to eat a particular type of food. They’ll hate it because of this! But a better way of getting children to eat a particular food is to make it seem like it’s their idea to eat it (or to mash it up inside something else so they don’t realise they’re eating it!)

I think that the Internet, is a great way of ‘mashing up’ these things. New media has a reputation of being bad for literacy. But encouraging children with lower literacy skills to, for example, subscribe to the blogs of people they’re interested in, or add feeds to their personal page, can only improve their reading skills and reduce the bad feelings that some children have with reading. If I had my way, I would encourage every student in my school to maintain a page with feeds from news sites and sites they find interesting.

It’s a simple solution, but sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.

I worry that schools struggle to keep up with the new technology. In many cases they are scared of implementing it in case it is misused, despite the opportunities it offers, which I find difficult to comprehend!