And some plants, a Barbara Hepworth and a pagoda.
Archive for the ‘London’ Category
Ducklings in Battersea Park
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
PDF Music at Rambert
Monday, April 12th, 2010Very nice article about music at Rambert from the magazine of the ISM. Great to see all the big topics (what’s music for? how do choreographers & composers work together? who gets the last word? what are the problems?) raised in print.
Places that are still there #2: The Cosmoba, Bloomsbury
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
The Cosmoba, restaurant in Bloomsbury off Southampton Row
I can’t walk anywhere in Bloomsbury without being wistfully rushed back in time to when I was a student at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies back in 1978-81. And nowhere holds more potent memories for me of that time than the Cosmoba in Cosmo place just off Southampton Row. God rot the internet, however much I may love it: when I try to think what was so special about the Cosmoba, it’s not just that it was in a tiny corner of London that feels like a wonderful guilty secret, it was the warmth of friends, conversation and being out and about after dark.
So last year when, after about 28 years of losing contact, I met up with my friend Jackie from college, we decided to see if by any remote chance the Cosmoba was still there. Well, would you believe it, there it was, and it seemed much the same in so many ways, even down to the red wine, chicken kiev and zabaglione that was about the only thing I would ever order, once I’d found out how good it was.
We’re going again soon, so since I was cycling past Cosmo place on my way back from the IoE on Monday, I thought I’d double check that it’s still still there. And yes, it is.
The Tooting heron
Saturday, February 13th, 2010
Heron in Tooting
This wonderful heron visits our end of Tooting now and again. It’s a wonderful sight. The only one I’d ever seen before moving here was a concrete one in the back garden of our house in Dorset. Funnily enough, I’m going to Heron Quays just now…
Prêt à tuer
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010I was in Prêt à manger the other day, and the counter assistant (as she had been bidden by management, no doubt) started asking me with fake enthusiasm what I was doing in the area etc.
‘Oh research,’ she beamed, ‘how interesting! What subject? Ah! Education, how interesting. Just education generally, or some special subject in education?
‘Music education’, I replied. She might have replied ‘Oh cool’, and carried on. But instead, her face fell, and suddenly, her training and happy smile deserted her.
‘Eurgh’, she said, ‘I always hated music at school. I always think of music teachers as being, like, forty, and living alone with a cat.’
‘Really?’ I said, ‘that doesn’t fit any of my fellow students. Most of them look pretty cool, actually’
‘Yes, but if you think back to what your teachers were like when you were young.’
When I was young. She made it sound as if it must be so far back I could hardly remember. I was on the point of saying ‘Oh, yes, actually now you mention it’, but then remembered that wasn’t true. There were a few teachers who were mad or depressed or best left alone, but mostly my teachers were a pretty impressive lot. If we’d used the word then, I would even have said some of them were cool.
When I thought of that, this spinster-phobic waitress suddenly seemed very uncool. It was definitely not a good look, to be uncooled by your own coolness.
Ah well, that’s customer service for you.
Ten out of ten for the Tooting top ten
Monday, February 8th, 2010
Here’s a blog after my own heart: Tooting Top Ten, a list of, guess what, the top ten things about Tooting.
I like this guy’s writing. If you do, his new blog is at SavidgeTales over at WordPress.
1984 comes to 2010 – schools, IT and BETT
Saturday, January 16th, 2010
BETT 2010 at Olympia
Spent the afternoon at BETT yesterday, a trade show for educational technology. One reason for going was to drop in on Andrew Holdsworth’s Percy Parker’s Flying Bathtub, just published by Scholastic, and very nice it looks and sounds too.
But most of BETT I found profoundly worrying. I don’t have figures, but it seemed to be predominantly men touting software packages and ‘solutions’ for schools. Every other stand seemed to be about protecting, preventing, surveillance, policing, managing, storing, and even ‘performance managing’. This program will automatically text all your truants and their parents; this fingerprinting device will register your child (“biometric multilesson registration and cashless catering” was one of the more 1984-ish captions), this will keep your children safe from unsuitable internet sites, this hardware will back up all your data and provide a network for your school. Online assessment, online registration, automatic this, multi-that.
With a very, very few exceptions, I had almost no sense of teaching, learning, teachers and pupils, intellectual curiosity, or any of the rich human interaction that goes on in learning. Instead, it seemed I was at a trade fair selling expensive ‘solutions’ that appeared to criminalize an entire generation of children, or treat them as a workforce that needed managing, assessing and controlling. An image began to emerge of a child tightly bound in a technological network of biometric data, they and their families summoned and communicated with by text, every online transaction prescribed or prevented, stored and tracked electronically by an emergent army of male IT personnel, every academic subject reduced to an onscreen interaction with predigested, generic content. Media-rich, yes, but piss-poor as human interaction.
I’m not usually prone to technological determinism, the idea that society is helpless in the face of the ‘power’ of technology to shape and control it, but I came away from BETT wondering whether we do all this stuff to kids because we can, not because we must. And in any case, there were plenty of technological determinists touting their wares at BETT: this software will help you build an online global learning community. Really? Anyone who’s tried to run an online forum knows that it’s people and people alone who build communities, all the software in the world can’t do that for you. Nobody buys a bassoon thinking it will make music for them, but people seem to fall over themselves to buy into technology that needs staff, time, expertise and commitment, not just a power supply.
My final rant? As I was walking around seeing all this stuff about protection, walled-gardens, security, safety and so-on, I had my barcoded badge scanned aggressively and without my permission by at least two staff on the stands, data-mugging in broad daylight.
