The bloke in the bowler hat

There is something mildly depressing about walking up Beech Street from the Barbican Station the The Brewery, where the Handheld Learning Conference was held. Whether it's the lack of sunlight, the narrow pavement or the fact that the only thing of even mild interest is the entrance to a car park, I don't know.

But whatever it is, I've taken to using Moorgate Station instead. The distance is the same, possibly shorter, and the walk to The Brewery off Chiswell Street far more interesting. In fact, I was certain that I'd taken a photo of some of the architecture along the way, but it would appear not.

It's not just the architecture, of course, but the people. People walking along reading the free newspaper City AM. People darting into coffee shops to get their first fix of the day. Leisurely people hovering outside buildings enjoying a nicotine fix, and unleisurely people (like myself) rushing to make a deadline.

They say that it's not the destination but the journey that's important. Yes, to an extent. But whatever the weather or the state of the trains, the journey to the Brewery always ends in being greeted by a bloke wearing a bowler hat and a huge grin.

"Good morning, Sir! Are you here for the conference?"

"That's right".

"Just go straight through those doors, Sir. Have a wonderful day!"

The Brewery itself is a strange sort of building. You can go up the stairs at one end, but to get to the upper floor at the other end you have to go down and then up. If there's a session in progress in one of the lower rooms, you have to go down, out and then up. The first couple of times I went there I became slightly lost, and I'm convinced that if anyone looked hard enough they'd find Lord Lucan meandering around in the vaults, looking for a way out.

I quite like the place. It has character. Even more importantly, it has space, which is something you need for a conference with 1500 (I believe) delegates. It was easy to mingle and network, and that's pretty important. Some delegates complained about the price of coffee on the first day: £2.50. I agree it is pricey, but actually no more so than coffee anywhere else in London (and less than places like Starbucks). And, to put the whole thing in perspective, the first day of the Handheld Learning Conference 2009 was free!

The conference itself, which I am in the process of writing about on the ICT in Education website, was very good indeed. In fact, I always like to note down my immediate reaction to an event at its close, even though I like to mull it over before actually writing about it. My verdict this time was 'exhilarating'.

Admittedly, not the usual sort of evaluation of an educational conference, but that was my feeling. There was a great mix of intellectual stimulation from thought-provoking talks, and from what people are actually doing in their classrooms. I came away buzzing.

Great stuff!

To find more articles on the web or in Twitter, use the tag HHL09 or #HHL09 respectively.

Further reading

Lord Lucan

Hand-holding

Reflections on Handheld Learning: Technology May Give Parents Consumer Power, But Is That Unequivocally Good?

Reflections on Handheld Learning: Authenticity vs Karaoke, and magnificent failure vs benign success

Technorati Tags: HHL09 #HHL09 "Handheld Learning Conference" "Terry Freedman"

A Writer's Diary: Friday - full circle....

I don’t write much on Fridays. Perhaps it’s because of the fact that as the week draws to an end I find myself winding down. However, because I am perfectly able to get on with other work, I suspect it is more to do with finding myself in need of the sort of creativity boost that can only come from sitting in a café…

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• A Writer's Diary: Monday
• A Writer's Diary: Tuesday
• A Writer's Diary: Wednesday
• A Writer's Diary: Thursday - The Dreaded Deadlines (terryfreedman.blogspot.com)

A Writer's Diary: Thursday - The Dreaded Deadlines

I am having one of those days. As deadlines start to close in on me, like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead, my ability to be creative is rapidly diminishing. This is bad news: I have an article to write for my own website, and one to write for an American website, Technology and Learning.

It’s very interesting writing for an American audience. Every so often I get taken to task for using ‘learnt’ instead of ‘learned’ or ‘different from’ rather than ‘different than’. That crack by Oscar Wilde about the British and the Americans having everything in common except, of course, language is almost true!

My solution is to take myself off to the gym. I have recently taken up keep fit in a serious way, going to the gym or going swimming at least three times a week. It sounds like a waste of time, and indeed it is time I can ill afford. However, I don’t think it’s my imagination that the surge of creativity I experience afterwards outweighs the time used.

Moreover, a happy side effect is that I am becoming more Adonis-like with every passing day. I will soon be so thin it will be impossible to see me when I turn sideways.

A Writer's Diary: Wednesday -- Newsletter Editing

I thought I’d do some editing. A few people have sent me articles for my Computers in Classrooms newsletter, so I thought I’d go through them.

In the past I have tried giving copious guidelines to would-be contributors, or stating that the preferred document type is plain text. People did take notice of the guidelines, but the wordprocessor didn’t. Bizarrely, I discovered that documents formatted in the same way in different versions of this wordprocessor actually came out looking different to each other anyway. Plain text is by far the better option in a way, but nobody likes to create documents in boring old plain text, myself included. So half of my job as editor is sorting out formatting.

Oh well, it keeps me off the streets I suppose!

The image above was created using ComicBrush in accordance with its terms and conditions.

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A Writer's Diary: Tuesday

I’m rich! Well, OK, not rich exactly, but getting there. It can only be a matter of time before I am lying in a hammock somewhere dictating my next bestseller.

What has brought on this feeling of euphoria, you ask. Well, I had an email today informing me that I’ve earned a couple of quid from a book I self-published using Lulu (http://www.lulu.com/terryfreedman). It’s a print-on-demand service, and although getting rich from it could take some time, it has at least two good things going for it:

Firstly, it gives a writer an opportunity to publish, in a very professional-looking way, a book on a subject that is of such a minority appeal that getting it published by the more traditional route is very unlikely to happen.

Secondly, the time lag between sending off your ‘manuscript’ and seeing the published book can be as little as two weeks. That is excellent for people like myself for whom the concept of ‘deferred gratification’ is anathema.

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A Writer's Diary: Monday

I was recently invited by the Society of Authors to write a diary for a week, from a writer's perspective. Here is the result.

I’m feeling quite pleased with myself. I don’t usually write short stories, but today I managed to think about, write (in my head, again) and then actually write a work of fiction which will fit nicely into a free newsletter I publish, called Computers in Classrooms (http://terry-freedman.org.uk/landingpages/doc_page41.html). I don’t often include such examples of frivolity in the newsletter, but teachers do not live by serious articles alone.

I can’t reproduce it here because that would be unfair on my subscribers. However, what I can tell you is that I’ve written it in the ‘hard-boiled’ style of Raymond Chandler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler). Now there’s an interesting exercise in itself: try writing about a subject in a style that is completely antithetical to the subject matter. In my case, the result is reasonably humorous because of the incongruity, and so gives a bit of light relief. Heaven knows we could do with some light relief in education!

Postscript

The story has now been published on the website.

A Writer's Diary: Sunday

I was recently invited by the Society of Authors to write a diary for a week, from a writer's perspective. Here is the result.

I decided the most creative writing-inducing activity would be to do no writing at all. Well, not physically anyway. I do a lot of writing in my head, and then have to go through the laborious process of making notes before I forget, and then actually typing it up. If scientists could find a way of plugging my head straight into the printer, I’d have a lot more time on my hands.

A great stimulus, I find, is photography. I always try and take a digital camera with me wherever I go. It fits into a pocket, and now and then there’s a great shot just waiting to be taken.

Other times, I like to take photos of ordinary everyday objects just to be able to illustrate articles on my website (http://www.ictineducation.org) without having to concern myself with copyright issues.

And occasionally I like to take pictures of strange or beautiful patterns, such as formed by sunlight through trees or the shadow of a wrought iron gate on the ground, to serve as a stimulus for a bit of creative writing in the future.

I store a lot of my pictures on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/terryfreedman), where they languish mostly unseen and therefore mostly unloved – but at least they are there should I need something with which to illustrate an article.

So, off to the park, enjoying the summer weather and just relaxing, and not really thinking about writing at all. I managed to obtain some nice photos though, which I hope will come in handy one of these days.

Then home, to do some reading. I have mixed feelings about the value of reading for a writer. The conventional wisdom is that the more well-read you are, the better a writer you will be. I’m not so sure. Part of me thinks that the less cluttered your mind is with other people’s thoughts, the less derivative a writer you are likely to be.

I first started to doubt the value of reading, specifically literary criticism, when doing my English ‘A’ Level.  After a week spent reading and making copious notes on the views of the Great and the Good about Hamlet, I came to the following conclusions:

1. All these experts completely disagree with each other, and presumably they can’t all be right?

2. They all back up their arguments or draw their conclusions by extensive references to the text of the play itself.

3. Taking points 1 and 2 together, I had just as much right to form my own opinions which, as long as they were grounded in the text of the play, were just as valid as anyone else’s.

4. Following on from point 3, why would I want to waste my time trying to glean insights from all those other people?

Bear in mind that that was my 18 year-old self speaking, and I no longer hold such self-assured, bordering on arrogant, views. Nevertheless, when it came to my thinking about writing a review of the Waiting For Godot production at Her Majesty’s, it occurred to me that rather than do a load of research into the play in order to check if my views were ‘correct’, I’d be better off just ploughing ahead with it.

Incidentally, that’s another work that is currently residing in my head; otherwise I’d have given a reference for it here.

A Writer's Diary: Saturday

I was recently invited by the Society of Authors to write a diary for a week, from a writer's perspective. Here is the result.

It may seem a bit odd to begin a weekly diary on Saturday, but from a writing point of view, that’s when my week begins. Saturday is the day when I can prioritise writing over my work (some of which involves writing: it gets a bit complicated).

All cafés should have free wireless internet access. I often like to write in a cafe, because being away from the usual ‘stuff’ tends to release my creative juices. I like to go there with a pencil and notepad, but also with a laptop sometimes. A free wireless connection, in addition to being useful, would also go some way towards compensating for some pretty dire service. Like the cafe I went to on Saturday...

Me: May I have a cheese salad sandwich, please?

Girl behind counter: No, we can’t do that.

Me: Why not?

GBC: Hang on, I’ll find out.

...

GBC: No. We can’t do that.

Me: But why not? You’ve got a cheese salad roll there.

GBC: Hang on, I’ll find out.

...

GBC: Here you are (proffering the cheese salad roll).

Me: Yes, that’s a cheese salad roll. I was asking about a cheese salad sandwich.

GBC: Hang on, I’ll find out.

...

GBC: Yes OK, we’ll do that. Anything else?

Me: Yes. I’d like fish fingers, chips and baked beans, please.

GBC: Fish fingers and chips.

Me: Yes, with baked beans.

GBC: Is that fish fingers and chips twice?

Me: No, it’s fish fingers and chips once, with baked beans.

Whilst sitting at a table drinking my cup of dishwater, I was wondering aloud to my wife what we’d actually be served with. Just then, the GBC appeared and said, “Would you like butter on your tuna and sweetcorn roll?”

“What tuna and sweetcorn roll?”, I asked. “I didn’t order a tuna and sweetcorn roll!”

“Oh no, wrong table”, she said, and ran away.

By some miracle, we actually did get the food we ordered, and very nice it was too. But that sort of ‘service’ is very annoying, and not conducive to creative output. Mind you, having said that, I got this article out of it, and there will be another one coming soon about how welcome the new Hospitality Diploma is, and how it ought to be compulsory in schools, alongside Maths and English.

But I still think a wireless internet connection would have been nice.