Posts Tagged Events
From Foxtrot to Facebook…
Posted by Ben in Digital Identity, Events, education on April 19, 2010
If you’ve read my blog before, you’ll know that I’ve talked a lot about digital identity and education in the past. It’s something that, having been a student, teacher, and being an active digital citizen, I feel really passionate about.
I’ve spent a lot of time discussing and analysing my own digital identity, but recently I’ve started conducting some deeper research into the world of DI – looking at how people of different generations perceive and interact with technology, their identities both on and offline, and how things change with time, age, location and background.
Sharing Results
Last week, I was invited to speak at an event hosted by the University of Reading and KT Equal, exploring what having a digital identity means for the elderly generation. Designed to be a workshop for both older people and academics, it was a real think-tank. Attendees got the chance to look not only at what current technologies are of interest to older people, but think about how we make technology more accessible, what the common barriers are to adoption, and hear some first hand case studies on the subject.
I was invited to give a talk and share some of the early research I’ve been doing around generational differences within digital identity, focussing on the overriding community aspect of the social web and how it differs from the communities in which some of the older members of the audience would have grown up in.
The slides on the left illustrate some of the examples I used, and poses some pretty interesting questions that are going to form the basis of some of my future research.
First off, there’s the assumption that everything has changed. There’s no doubt that technology has changed the world in many ways – it’s a huge enabler, and there are things that we now take for granted that simply weren’t possible 50 years ago.
But is it really a completely different story?
In With the Old
We’re all guilty of it – assuming that the latest technology is a revolution to the point that it redefines the world. It happened with desktop computers, mobile phones, tablet computers… and I’m certain it’ll happen again and again and again. What I started to see in my research however is far from a revolution – the very social, community driven nature of our society hasn’t died. It’s adapted. The ‘web 2.0’ generation of online services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr (the list goes on) haven’t, fundamentally, been anything groundbreaking. They’ve almost re-invented the wheel.
That’s not a negative thing at all – it really is a huge enabler, taking communities away from their geographic boundaries and making them global. People are drawn together because of the things they love, rather than the place they live. It’s an extension of the real world – another way of communicating – and it’s brilliant.
Digital identity forms a huge part of that – your digital identity is your window into this world, and you can either choose to be yourself, or to take on an entirely new persona. Is this a bad thing? I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that question – but it’s one I’m looking forward to answering as my research continues.
If you have a story around social communities or digital identity, I’d really love to hear from you. Drop me an email, or find me out and about in the social web!
Yes, We Have That in Reading…
Posted by Ben in Events, General Thoughts on February 11, 2010
I moved from the bustling metropolis of London to Reading around 18 months ago, and was worried that I’d be leaving a centre of culture and diversity for somewhere a lot… well… quieter.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Reading has proven itself to be a real hub of fantastic events that have captured every single interest I have – from geek nights and developer conferences to music and social events – I’ve never had more people to meet and places to be than I have since I came here.
Rather than replicate the plethora of high quality (frankly better than I could write!) reviews of the events that I’ve been to recently, I thought I’d pick out some highlights, to show how diverse and rich life in Reading really is…
![image_ce939007-42e7-419f-b6e7-1ef70f15bd75[1] copy](http://www.theopenbracket.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/image_ce93900742e7419fb6e71ef70f15bd751copy.png "image_ce939007-42e7-419f-b6e7-1ef70f15bd75[1] copy")
Developer, Developer, Developer
Having so many technology companies in the town – most notably the largest Microsoft subsidiary outside of the US – is bound to create a climate that any self-respecting geek, nerd or gadget lover would feel comfortable in. I’ve written before about how fantastic the UK tech community is – and once a year they descend upon Reading for DDD – the biggest and most oversubscribed free community event of the year. Aimed at developers, but with an agenda most IT Pros would also love, it’s a day to come and learn what’s hot, what’s not, and meet other people who are passionate about the industry.
Events like this just go to show how fantastic a place the UK tech scene is. DDD is repeated in Scotland, Ireland and in the South West, by popular demand. Take a look back on the #DDD8 hashtag for commentary from the event, and check out www.developerdeveloperdeveloper.com.
There were so many blog posts in the week that followed, posting a full review would just be repeating what other people have written. Craig Murphy’s blog has a list of the best reviews from the day, as well as a fantastic insight into the event from a community veteran.
You can also check out videos shot on the day of some of the sessions (as well as some of the presenter pranks of the day) over at Plip’s Vimeo page.
The Reading Geek Night
Following the success of the Reading Tweetups, Jim Anning had the idea of a monthly, more technically focussed event where people could come and talk on the topics they’re most passionate about.
This week marked the fourth geek night – and what a success it was. I was impressed with the turnout and response from the first one, at which I spoke, and the event has continued to grow from there into a place where you can learn more about technology, projects, best practise and even ‘how to screw up every project you ever work on’.
The Geek Nights happen once a month, and you can find out more information at www.readinggeeknight.com or by looking up the #RDGGeek hashtag on Twitter.
Battle of the School Bands
Less technology, more seeing just how much talent young people in Reading have! Pete Doyle runs Reading Rock Academy and had always dreamed of putting on a show like this. He started doing some IT work at a local school for Autistic children, and quickly the idea of a charity gig to raise money for the school was born.
The event, at Reading’s Hexagon, was a huge success – I got to see some really fantastic local bands (notably Fortune Favours the Fallen and The Quotes) and the winners (Yellow Fever) really deserved to win. All proceeds for the event went to the school – and the winning band took a £5,000 cheque back to their schools for music equipment, plus a day in the recording studio for themselves.
More to come…
There are new events popping up locally all the time. Twestival is returning to Reading – on March 25th at a yet-to-be-confirmed venue – and will once again aim to raise as much money for charity in one night. The Reading Tweetup continues to be every other Wednesday, and is a great place to meet new people from the area.
Don’t get me wrong – I still love going into London for events like the Gay Geek Dinner – but I don’t feel like I’m missing out living in Reading. Quite the opposite in fact – discovering Reading has been like discovering a secret goldmine of inspiration and ideas… ones I find myself wherever I am!
The Real IT Crowd…
When you say the word ‘geek’ to some people, they think of spots, hunchbacks, and an inability to find a date.
The notion of geeks being anti-social is one of those urban myths, sort of like when your Mother told you that the moon was made of meat, or that if you picked your nose your brains would fall out. Over the past two decades, ‘social geeks’ have regularly met up, discussed cool stuff, and braved the world beyond their screen in the interests of getting to know one another. This gave birth to one of the IT industry’s best kept secrets:
The ‘Geek’ Community
It’s not all socialising – there are user groups, presenter nights, think tanks and conferences – and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the 12 months I’ve been involved in the tech community, it’s that a social geek is a more productive geek.
“Each time I attend a community event, whether it be a conference, presentation or just a few beers I never come away without learning something new.” said an enthused Dominic Green, a recent university graduate who joined Microsoft as a developer, Azure enthusiast and general boffin. “That’s one of the great things about the dev community – everyone involved in it is so passionate about software development, it creates an almost addictive atmosphere.”
It’s not just stalwart developers that benefit from the UK tech scene – Ben Hall, all round IT ninja and co-author of Testing ASP.NET Web Applications had this to say: “Being part of the community has opened my eyes with regard to writing amazing code and using different frameworks to their full advantage, allowing me to be a better informed developer and benefiting my team and others around me.”
Ben was keen to let us know it’s not all about writing code – “With the support of my peers within the community, I have been given the opportunity to speak at conferences and become a published author – something I never thought possible before joining my first user group”.
While the scale of the tech scene is a well-kept secret, many people seem to struggle with a more profound problem – how to get involved. The saying “it’s who you know” is thrown around a lot, and seems to put a lot of people off of the tech scene – I mean – what’s the point in trying to open a door if it’s locked from the inside?
Thankfully, the door is a lie.
When I first started getting involved in the UK tech scene, I knew very few people that were a part of it… but I decided to jump in at the deep end, and see how easy it was to keep afloat – and so I went along to an event… and people talked to me. People I didn’t know. People I got talking to. People I then met up with for coffee. And a drink or five.
“The developer community has exposed me to many technologies and concepts that I would not have experienced without the wide range of people, interests and experiences.” Dom said to me. “Being a part of the developer community has allowed me to build up a great network of contacts and friends.” – and he really hit the nail on the head with that – these people aren’t just contacts, some of them are now friends too.
So how can you get involved?
Go to an event, user group, geek night, tweetup or general geek themed shindig. There are always people there willing to be social and tell you what’s on their mind.- Don’t just listen – join in the conversation. Twitter is a great medium for that if you can’t make it to a physical event.
- Love the geek world, and it will love you. If you’re passionate about what you do – whether you’re a developer, an IT Pro or just a technology enthusiast – you’ll find like-minded people.
Check out the LondonDev Community calendar for geek events in London, other events in and around the south of England, and check out the GeekUp and other events if you’re based ‘up north’ or in Scotland.
There may be a local tweetup near you too – take a look around at the various events happening in the UK.
I’ll see you there!
Who said geeks don’t go out?
So having missed last week’s TechNet After Hours event in London (run by Alex Ball and her team) through food poisoning, I was really keen to get out to a tech event to let my inner geek stretch it’s legs. That’s why I’m here at work (well, in the same campus) on a Saturday with the likes of Dominic Green and a huge crowd of developers and IT pros from all over the UK at the seventh DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Day.
While the event is held (and sponsored) by the company owned by it’s namesake, it’s not a Microsoft event and the speakers come from a huge range of different areas within the IT community. If the thought of knocking minds with some of the best and brightest developers and technologists in the industry doesn’t take your fancy, there’s always the free lunch and breakfast rolls, and more pairs of DDD socks than you could wear in a month.
There’s been a huge array of sessions here do far today, from deep dives into WCF web services to much broader overviews of how to listen to a user’s requirements (which involved us all being asked to describe our underpants…), there’s been something for everyone.
Even further proving that geeks have a social life, the event comes complete with it’s own ‘geek dinner’ this evening – a great chance to network and let your hair down with other techies. So, reviews of specific sessions to follow - but in the mean time, if you’re at all into technology, I strongly suggest you check out some of the community links below.
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Mixing in a little tech…
Posted by Ben in Events, New Technologies, Web Technologies on February 8, 2008
Add a dash of mashup, a sprinkling of silverlight… and you’ve got the perfect bad cooking pun. Whatever your culinary tastes, I was MIXing it all up last week here in Greenwich as the host of a day-long Microsoft event. MIX, for those of you who don’t know, is an annual conference dealing with the future of the web. That big ol’ internet. MIX On Campus is the same – only focussed on putting this technology into the hands of students – tomorrow’s market leaders.
And so it came to be – at 10am on a Monday morning, 35 students walked in to their lecture theatre to find free trials, pens and pads waiting for each one of them. I even had some cool jazz playing as they came in. And then it was down to buisiness.
The first session I delivered wasn’t actually focussed on a web technology per-se, being on the Office 2007 System, but it provided a valueble insight for those attending into why the interface has changed so much, and why it’s better for them. So many of the questions I get an an MSP about Office are based around that area, and I wanted to share with people the actual reason behind the ribbon, the different ways of doing things… and thanks to a little help from Darren Strange, I think I managed it pretty well. A lot of students were impressed at the demo stage when I was showing off things like real-time rollover previews for styles etc. It’s also worrying that many students thought you had to be running Vista to be running Office 2007.
Still, a large number of students on the day were impressed by Office 2007 – and since I’d provided each of them with a free 60 day trial CD, they could see for themselves with no obligation. I reminded them of the Ultimate Steal, which runs until April, so hopefully once they’ve tried the 2007 way of doing things they’ll make the switch. You can see on the right just how happy some of the studens were with not only the freebies, but the free lunch that broke the event up. Aren’t I a good host? 
So the afternoon came, and with it brought the two other main focusses of the day – Silverlight & Popfly. Now given as the students at the event are all training to become teachers, I wanted to focus less on the hardcore ‘this is how you code this is what you can make’ side of these two new technologies, and more on the ‘this is what it can mean for you’ side of it all.
Thanks to a great explanation of Mashups I found on Eileen Brown’s blog, and a great demo on how Silverlight can be used in conjunction with VLEs at BETT, I was able to do that pretty well. I demonstrated ways of managing, organising and retrieving student data and informtion, as well as how cool you can get things looking under Silverlight. I talked about what mashups could mean to them – demonstrating Tafti, and how you can use Tafti to drag searches and save them to your Live Spaces.
All in all, 35 students left at the end of the day excited about some of the new technology coming their way. I don’t blame them either – I remember how excited I was by the thought of Silverlight, how awesome creating my first Mashup was… and I’m just glad that a group of students who are training to teach other students will be able to pass it all on!
… And to all a Good Night!
Posted by Ben in Events, General Thoughts on December 22, 2007
In honour of The Open Bracket’s last post before Christmas:
“‘Twas the nocturnal segment of the diurnal period preceding the annual Yuletide celebration and throughout our place of residence,
Kinetic activity was not in evidence among the possessors of this potential, including that species of domestic rodent known as Mus Musculus.
Hosiery was meticulously suspended from the forward edge of the wood-burning caloric apparatus pursuant to our anticipatory pleasure regarding an imminent visitation from an eccentric philanthropist among whose folkloric appellations is the honorific title of St. Nicholas.”
Political correctness eat your heart out! Have a fantastic holiday season!
Video Games Live
On Monday of this week I was lucky enough to be at Video Games Live, a huge multi-national sell-out event that kicked off the London Games Festival. Not only did I go along, but thanks to Microsoft I got the chance to have a chat with the event’s creators – two legends of both the video game and the music world with a string of titles including Myst, Splinter Cell and Mass Effect under their belts.
The event was held at the newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall, on London’s scenic Southbank. The sun was… well… shining somewhere, the birds were… Ok, just take it from me that there was a pretty good atmosphere around the venue – even at 3pm, four and a half hours before the event was due to start. I went to go and get a coffee and a little girl ran in front of me dressed in a Princess Peach outfit. I started looking around and realised that on almost every table I could see someone sat wearing a T-shirt bearing either a game logo, or something game related. At one large table, a group of students were playing DS on wireless linkup… Heck, if I didn’t have stuff to do I’d have planted a flag right there on Southbank and re-named it ‘Gametopia’.
So, a caramel latte and a press pass later, I was in the “games room” waiting for my interview slot to arrive. I don’t have an Xbox at home – I’m waiting to get an Elite and a nice HDTV at the same time – and so I was literally drooling with a combination of jealousy and excitement at the Xbox-lined walls. Microsoft were running a Guitar Hero play-off, with a 360 Elite as the main prize – the queue was almost on the story below with many a gamer trying their hardest to mash-out Sweet Child ‘o Mine better than the last guy. Halo 3 was also a popular choice, in spite of there being no prizes on offer for playing it. There was one player who was maybe a little too into Halo, but hey.
Imagine if it was live and you could experience it with the video and the lights and the sound” said Tommy Tallarico – founder of the event and industry veteran – after I caught up with him backstage. “”I like to say that Video Games Live is the power and motion of a symphony orchestra combined with the excitement and energy of a rock concert, mixed in with the cutting edge visuals, technology, interactivity and fun that video games provide… Or something like that”. “Madness” was the only thing co-founder Jack Wall had to add to the question.
After we settled down into the shiny new autitorium and the last few revellers had settled into their seats the orchestra took up their instruments and gave us… pong. The first part of the show was an accolade to the games of yore, with classics ranging from Space Invaders to Sonic the Hedgehog. Having grown up in a gaming household in the late 80s, there was something magical about hearing the Green Hill Zone music played by an orchestra.
It’s not like it was all orchestra and video playback though – after a short time a member of the audience was picked out to go up on stage and play Space Invaders – motion tracked in sync with the screen and music provided live by the orchestra! Similarly, two lucky members of the crowd got to go head to head in a game of Frogger – all for wonderful Xbox related prizes!
“It’s one of the reasons we created the show the way we did,” said Tommy. “With the synchronised video, with the synchronised lighting, with the interactivity… We created this so that non-gamers out there could follow along and enjoy it just as much as the hardcore gamers – and that’s one thing that differentiates what we’re doing from anyone else in the world trying to do game concerts.”
There were plenty of treats for the hardcore gaming community though, and the most anticipated soundtrack – the music from Halo 3 – was saved till last. With the orchestra filing off the stage and a contented crowd piling back into the foyer, I managed to catch up with a few of the concert-goers to see what they thought of the event. One lady wearing a “+15 fire resistance” baseball cap simply told me “The best night of my life. Amazing.”. It was a similar story from many, even those not into hardcore gaming. “I never knew that games had that kind of music” said one. “I can see why people get really into games”.
I can’t help but agree with them. Having grown up in a gaming family, and having been pretty musical, this event really married two of the things I love (and have studied to some degree) with lights, sound and some really great audience participation. If you missed it, you really missed out – but don’t worry. Tommy promised that they’d be back for years to come though – “.It took Cirque du Soleil 7 years to get to where it was. We’re in year 2 and a half, so imagine where we’ll be in seven years from now. Selling out Wembley 2010! Come see the show!”.
If you want some more info, check out the Video Games Live website. Also, check out Jack and Tommy’s other major project, the Game Audio Network Guild. Don’t forget that if you’re around London at all over the next couple of weeks, the London Games Festival will be in full swing, so check out what’s happening and join in some of the great events going on!
The full interview with Video Games Live creators Tommy Tallarico & Jack Wall will be published in the November issue of the Microsoft StudentZine.
Keep checking back for the audio podcast!
