This blog is a chronicle of the happenings, ideas and projects that float in and around The Pollen Shop.

We don’t need no education

July 20th, 2010

The BBC technology is running a story about an idea that started in Indian slums to enable children teach themselves – and others – how to use the Internet to and gather information.

Professor Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity

The research raises some interesting questions about how children learn and the value of teaching, especially in the field of technology where many common processes are built to support self-learning.

It also highlights how research plays in different situations. Sugata Mitra’s has been promoting his work for while, but only now in these fiscally challenged times has it popped into the consciousness of BBC technology.

Should UK teachers be worried that they are going to be automated? – Probably not. But it does suggest something that every techie already knows that technologies are ‘learnt’ not ‘taught’

Sugata Mitra Speaking at LIFT 2007 about his Hole in the Wall project.

Tagged as: BBC, education, india, techies
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Polls Apart 2010

February 22nd, 2010

Polls Apart report

The Pollen Shop is again helping Scope with the Polls Apart campaign. In one way or another we have been involved in this project for over a decade. We are currently in the process of developing the data capture website through which people can tell us about the accessibility of their polling stations.

The objective of the campaign is to ensure that disabled people have the same access to Britain’s democracy as everyone else. One way we do this is by surveying polling stations at election time to find out which are accessible and which have barriers that prevent people from voting. In previous years we have found that the majority of polling stations have one or more accesses barriers that would prevent – or significantly hinder – someone from voting. These barriers are things like flights of steps, rickety ramps or low lighting. They might not seem much but they have a significant impact on disabled people, older people or even parents with pushchairs. Often they might not absolutely prevent someone from voting – we’ve known wheelchair users to be carried up stairs to vote – but they do create a significant disincentive for people to take part.
Obviously there is postal voting. Now that this is more freely available it has added a new dimension and an alternative for people who have stable voting intentions. Provided you can read and write and do the origami needed to send the vote back you have a second channel through which you can vote. Buts it’s not an identical or as instant as putting a ballot paper in a ballot box. People need to vote days in advance and as we all know a lot can change in the space of a few hours in politics. There is also the possibility of vote grazing where people return ballots for other people who are unwilling or unable to protect their vote.

And then of course there is proxy voting which is entrusting your vote to someone you trust who votes on your behalf as instructed. Not exactly fail safe is it!!

Technology was tried but the government ran away with their tails between their legs.

So what we are left with is paper and pencils and polling stations. The Campaign seeks to make this ancient process as accessible as possible to ensure that everyone has the same rights to take part in the democratic process.

Tagged as: Polls Apart, Technology, voting
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The SS IPAD

January 29th, 2010

We feel great today. We met this bloke outside our offices, who had this shiny bottle with him. Apparently, it’s full of wonderful snake-oil… and all we had to do was pay him several hundred pounds – and it was ours.

What could we do? The bottle was really shiny, and kind of mid-sized. Bigger than the bottles we keep in our pockets – yet smaller than the bottles we have on our desks. So we bought it and now we feel great.

We’re sorry. We really feel we should love all Apple products… But their new SS IPad (stands for Shiny, Shiny Ipad) only handles one application at a time and doesn’t support Flash!

So that rules out most of the internet’s video content – which is delivered via Flash.

And one App at a time? This is not a step forward. So shiny-shiny… but not that Flash really.

Please, Apple, please, produce software and Operating System’s worthy of the hardware you create. The shells are things of beauty. Make them run beautifully. We might as well take a glitter-ball and an overhead projector to meetings…

I’ll give the last word to Adolph Hitler (not a phrase I often use – but these video clips have become a popular form of satirical, internet protest… just don’t try to view it on an IPad, it requires Flash).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQnT0zp8Ya4&feature=player_embed

Tagged as: adolph hitler, IPad, shiny shiny, Technology
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New research sheds light on our reactions to humanitarian crises

January 25th, 2010

Newly published research from the ESRC Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution (ELSE) suggests that the way people – whether members of the public or policy makers – react when faced with human fatalities is highly dependent on the distribution of death tolls they are typically exposed to.
According to Drs. Olivola and Sagara, we evaluate the seriousness of a disaster by first drawing upon a sample of comparable events from our memory to obtain a set of comparison death tolls. We might, for example, compare a target event with other disasters that we have seen in the news or heard about from talking to family, friends, or colleagues. Then we compare the target event with all those we have drawn from memory. The ‘‘shock’’ associated with a target death toll is simply its relative rank-position within the set of comparison events rather than some fundamental value on a scale of human fatalities.
The research obviously highlights many questions about the shockability of people who are connected into a 24 hour news cycle. In a world where we are bombarded with news about global tragedies how is technology impacting the way public policy is developed to react to humanitarian disasters?

Tagged as: 24 hour news, disaster
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Happy Christmas

December 23rd, 2009

Happy Christmas video from The Pollen Shop (and Tom waits)

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The business case for accessibility

December 17th, 2009

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) have released a resource outlining the business case for making a website accessible.

Although this is a good little resource to help build a case for web accessibility – the content doesn’t reveal anything spectactluarly new to those already familiar to web accessibility.

And it really, really lacks decent case studies. The Tesco case study is over 5 years old and appears with the caveat “not current best practice” and the CNET study is a single quote from a presentation on captioning.

C’mon guys, you are the global authority on web accessibility – you should have had this covered before you went live.

Thankfully, they do invite other case studies and even offer to help organisations gather data to build a case study. And we need to get a large cross section of businesses and organisations of all sizes included.

So, if you’ve made changes to the accessibility of your website in the last 3 years, please tell the WAI about it: team-accessibility-business-case@w3.org

It’s a win, win situation. The good publicity of being a WAI case study for accessibility should be obvious… and the more good case studies we have – the more persuasive the argument for those yet to take on accessibility.

Not sure if you’re the right stuff for a case study? Give us a shout and we’ll help you create your case study. It’s in everyones interest to get good examples up for the world to see.

Tagged as: Accessibility, The Pollen Shop
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In an electronic age what is the worth of a signature.

December 14th, 2009

When we put pen to paper and sign our name we are confirming the validity of a document. Be it a postcard or a declaration of independence or a Letters Patent

image of John Hancock Signature

Our scrawls describe who we are and confirm the contents on that piece of paper.

But in a digital world how do we confirm who we are. And how do organisation confirming the contents of a communication are from the author. One way of doing this is through digital signatures where a person or organisation can confirm the validity of an electronic document or process through asymmetric cryptography.

Although this seems a million miles away from public service delivery how the UK public sector responds to this challenge will determine whether it can keep pace with wider technological changes.

Who we are matters, no more so when it comes to drawing down or interacting with public bodies. Claiming benefits, registering a birth, choosing a school place for a child, accessing domiciliary care, or joining a doctor’s surgery all require documentation and validation by a signature. To record and save them on paper is now impractical and to digitize them at the point of transition is costly and creates barriers to the effective transmission of data through and between organisations. Ultimately it slows down the pace of change and prevents the public sector transforming itself in the same way business has.

Digital signatures are vital for the automation of the business processes needed to transform UK public services. Eventually public authorities will have to confront alternatives to paper-based signatures as a form of identity but they will be caught in a Catch 22 situation until they invest in supporting personal accessible technology for everyone. Unlike businesses public authorities can’t exclude people because they don’t have the technology, and in the long term it is inefficient to move forward with a twin track approach.

Until someone looks at this seriously the pen will remains the universal technology that maters for public services.

Tagged as: digital signature, John Hancock, UK public sector
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Social workers could learn a lot from spooks

December 4th, 2009

When you update you status or twitter your position there are two kinds of people that are interested – people in your network, and those that silently observe you. The people in this last group are even more interested in what you have to say and how you say it than your friends.

Badge with ' I SPY' on it

Intelligence agencies and those with an interest in consumer intelligence use data mining and text analytics to good effect but so should those people who provide public services. This is beginning to happen but not routinely and rarely in areas like social care, health services and education.

Social networking is simply an opportunity for users to describe what they are doing. And by doing this you often also describe the behaviour that underpins your actions.

On 8.45 to Paddington, coffee terrible
Fellow passengers can hear the death metal on my iPod; strange looks all round.
I will not vote for a party that allows banks to pay massive bonuses to staff out of our hard earned taxes. Put your foot down Gordon.

Individually the above tweets are dull but collectively they can be built up into a picture of what different tribes are saying to each other on-line and what this means for behaviour. The tools that enable this can be as basic a search engine or as refined as AeroText Suite developed by from Lockheed Martin and now owned by Rocket Software.

User generated content is of course everywhere and not just on-line. Every time we interact with or through an organisation content is collected. Thanks to scanning, optical character recognition and automatic speech recognition technologies different kinds of content can now also be pulled together to enable organisations to understand what people are saying to them, about them and on issues that are relevant to their business.

This kind of intelligence is also critical for public services. Not only is this rich source of general information, it can be an important way of finding out why one group is behaving in one way and another is behaving differently. This can be particularly important for groups that use public services, but have historically not been as engaged as they should be.

To take a very simplistic example: It is perfectly possible to identify patterns of behaviour both on and off-line of young man and women and then correlate this against identifiable ‘causes’ of teenage pregnancy. This can then be used to identify places to engage with these groups and develop messaging and healthcare strategies to reduce the incidence of pregnancies. Without getting into the technical wizardry it is also possible to align actions with behaviour that can appear completely unrelated but may have a causal effect.

Understanding and using this technology is not only important for people who are fighting terrorism but all those that charged with delivering high quality public services.

Tagged as: data mining, public services, Social networking, spooks
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Employ a Danish model to improve services for disabled children

December 3rd, 2009

When it comes to public policy there is a lot of politically correct nonsense that prevents a sensible debate on providing services for disabled children. Politicians would do well on International Day of Disabled Persons to look at approaches taken elsewhere in Europe to create a society where disabled children and their families can flourish.

Everyone loves disabled kids

Everybody loves disabled kids. Every November millions of people prance around the streets in fancy dress and newsreaders become Beyonce for the night. All this is done for Children in Need and this year we raised 20,309,747. (Or to put it another way we gave on average 30p per person). Despite this paltry sum I salute Wogan et al for trying to do something positive. But the showbizz razzmatazz of Robbie Williams joining the other members on take that on stage can obscure the reality of being a disabled child in today’s Britain. It also lets politicians off the hook.

For a large number of disabled children life is not as much fun as it should be. This is of course a euphemism, but i don’t want to fall in to a trap of saying every disabled child in the UK has a terrible time. What is however clear is that measured against their non-disabled peers, disabled children are far more likely to live in poverty, households where parents have separated or families where the carer has depression.

And then there is education – Even if you agree with special schools, you must at least admit travelling hours on a coach every day when your sister goes to the one round the corner can’t be much fun.

And finally pain. Pain is never fun, especially for a child. Again I am not suggesting every disabled child is in pain but a significant proportion of them are. Lack of appropriate medical, therapeutic, and environmental interventions can also mean that many disabled children live in unnecessary and hidden pain. This is not just about medical pain relief but about how services are provided. A wheelchair may work but if it causes back pain it is not only inconvenient it is disempowering.

Don’t want pity
Disabled children don’t need or want your pity. But they and their parents do demand that public services are designed in a way that meets their needs rather than obstructs them. The right support will enable more disabled parents to work and to go some way to preventing family breakdown. But more importantly it will give disabled children the life chances they deserve.

Of course one answer to improving the lives of disabled children is to throw more money at the services they use. The Department for Children, Families and Schools in England is doing this by is investing almost half a billion pounds in additional services for disabled children .

Danish model
Given however a tightening of the public purse its worth looking internationally at what can be done most effectively with the resources available. In a report titled Participation in life situations of 8-12 year old children with cerebral palsy academics looked at how and if a group of disabled children participate in everyday activities across a range of European countries. In this context participation often simply means joining in with activities that other children engage in.

Out in front came Denmark and this could provide a model for how services are designed in the UK. The Danish model goes way beyond the strictures of our Disability Discrimination Act but actively promotes the inclusion of disabled children in everyday activities. A good example of this is that Denmark has a public system of after school clubs attended every day by most children up to age 12, whether disabled or not. Denmark also invests in national resources for providing information to families of disabled children about assistive technology

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
Given the above – and that that the UK Government formally adopted the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – participation should be the key to any future strategy for improving the lives of disabled children.

The challenge is how to make this a reality.

Tagged as: International Day of Disabled Persons, public policy
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