The idea for the language workshop came about after some reflection on my status as a linguistic mongrel. Growing up in India, which has around 26 official languages, it is next to impossible to remain a monoglot. As a child I lived in cities across the length and breadth of the country. Therefore, I was taught – Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Hindi and Sanskrit alongside English. Having spent eight years in Delhi I was exposed to Urdu and Punjabi. I picked up a bit of Japanese as I travelled there for work, and recently I have been tinkering with Dutch. I would like to emphasize that I am fluent only in English and Hindi, for the rest my skill-level varies from beginner/intermediate to just a few words.

There is a lot more that goes into speaking a new language than the ability to memorize words, swot grammar and regurgitate stock phrases. I think intuition, confidence and self-awareness play a very important role. The workshop was designed around these soft values. The students had been studying German and French (of which I know next to nothing) for a few months and I hoped that by the end of the session they would be sufficiently enthused to teach me a bit of both.

The workshop was divided into four sections – Making New Sounds; Looking for Similarities; Gestures and Emotions and Reading Japanese. We began with the easy, accessible stuff and then moved on to unfamiliar territory. Although a number of different languages were used, progress was pegged to speaking/reading Japanese in order to have some structure. The Reading Japanese section was a challenge – I introduced some logical rules about Kanji and asked students to read a sentence written in some fairly difficult characters.

To be honest I was quite nervous as the kids could focus on my lack of fluency and not take the session seriously. So I did a fair bit of practice beforehand with some native speakers. I also had another wee trick up my sleeve. This is something I used as an ice-breaker during my breath workshops in Japan. I wrote my name down in three scripts – Abhay, アバィ and अभय to illustrate how different my name sounds in different parts of the world. For the workshop we tried pronouncing names from various countries, tried a few tongue twisters and there was a sing-along to the 46 phonetic sounds of the Japanese language (あいうえお… etc.).

I am happy to report that the students were thoroughly excited and participated enthusiastically. After the Looking for Similarities bit, they started translating some of the things I was saying into German, which is what I had hoped for. In a way the workshop was already a success.

Then we came to the Reading Japanese challenge. I began by introducing the following characters: 日 (sun),　木 (tree),　本 (root/origin),　女 (woman),　子 (child),　言 (speak),　五 (five) and 口 (mouth). After explaining their meaning and how they have been derived, we looked at some combinations. For example, Japan is written as 日本. When correlated with the meaning of the individual characters it makes sense why Japan is called the land of the rising sun.

The atmosphere in the classroom was electric. Some students were keen to try their hand at writing Japanese.

We then moved onto making more kanji by combining the above. Starting with a simple example, 女 (woman) +子 (child) =好 (like) I asked students to guess what happens when many mouths say the same things, 五+口+言=?? You get the character for language 語 which is combination of all of the above (Obviously a wee bit of artistic license has been used to arrive at the above). And so piece by piece we assembled the sentence = 私は日本語が好きです。The kids had no trouble guessing what it meant. The atmosphere in the room was electric. Some students were keen to try their hand at writing Japanese, so we talked about stroke order and so on.

Given how successful the workshop was, I have been asked to consider delivering a few more. One of the teachers commented that there are very few male language teachers. There are a number of additional benefits, these range from employability to increasing tolerance of others. I won’t go into too much detail as this post has become fairly lengthy. I would like to end by saying that as usual, I cannot wait to work with another batch of students, hopefully in the very near future.

The first social media surgery in York took place in November 2009 and this past month we held the seventh. As we take a break over the summer months, I am writing this post to explain how we go about planning a surgery and what happens at the event. Hopefully some of the information shared here will be useful to you.

I would like to briefly present my case for organizing the surgeries in York. The format of the surgeries is quite flexible and I hope I can illustrate that they can accommodate a wide range of perspectives and intentions whilst achieving the desired outcome.

For a number of years I worked with various voluntary groups and human rights organizations in India in the capacity of a multimedia designer. As the voluntary sector is the target audience for the surgeries, I was keen to organize them in York to continue my association with the sector.

I also believe that there is far too much emphasis on the operational aspects of social media as compared to demonstrating how it can be adapted to different contexts. In my experience, the former can frighten people and put them off engaging with the www. On the contrary, once people can contextualize an online platform (website, social media) and match it to a genuine need, the subsequent transition to using it is an organic process.

Hosting a SMS is a collaborative effort and it is important to accommodate different points of view.

I have explained my case but I am aware that there are a wide range of opinions when it comes to social media education/ digital literacy initiatives. Furthermore, the surgeries have to cater to different expectations, from people who have no clue where to start, to those who want answers to specific technical questions and others who want to develop a long-term strategy. Therefore, right from the start it was obvious that the surgeries had to be a collaborative effort requiring assistance from other professionals, experts and practitioners, referred to as surgeons.

There are over a dozen surgeons from York and neighbouring cities who have given up their time to offer advice and information at York’s surgeries. This fairly detailed list on Twitter will give you an idea of who they are.

Whilst the surgeons bring a wide range of skills and expertise, it is important that we operate under a common philosophy. There are no set rules. However, a surgeon is expected to offer advice and information via a one-to-one chat with the visitor. It is recommended that the surgeon does not spend the entire session with one visitor. However, there is no pressure to meet a target.

As organizers, we try and create a relaxed environment. Evangelism and one-upmanship is discouraged. The visitor is free to speak to any surgeon (providing s/he is available) and more importantly, a surgeon can refer the patient to someone else if s/he does not know the answer to a question.

The surgeries are open to anyone from the third sector – community groups, voluntary organizations and charities. There are dozens of such groups in York and neighbouring regions. However it is not easy to get access to them for a variety of reasons. We began by publicizing the surgeries via Twitter and Facebook. We also created a hashtag #YorkSMS to track re-tweets (RTs) and get a sense of how the message was spreading. This strategy was useful in two ways – it allowed us to reach out to people who were already engaging with social media and wanted to find out more; it also helped generate word-of-mouth references and attract people who do not have an online presence.

There is always the possibility that no one will turn up, but given the spirit of collaboration and camaraderie, the surgeons don’t mind if we don’t get a huge turnout. It is never seen as a wasted effort.

There is always a possibility that no one will turn up on the day. As organizers we have been upfront about this when asking surgeons to volunteer. However, given the relaxed nature of the event and the spirit of collaboration and camaraderie, no one minds if we don’t get a huge turnout. This doesn’t mean that we are complacent. A couple of weeks ago we spent six hours on foot visiting various community centres (such as Burton Stone Lane) and speaking to the volunteer staff at the charity shops across the city to spread the word.

Earlier this year we received a tremendous boost when Learning City York decided to support us. Learning City York is a city wide consortium which includes the York Council (CYC). Through their support we were able to access an existing and vibrant network of voluntary groups known as the Yortime initiative. We were given access to two excellent locations in York – The Priory Street Center in Micklegate and the revamped York Central Library which is now known as Explore library. And finally, we were able to offer an additional incentive to visitors – free copies of the Yortime Web Guides. These have been written specifically for the voluntary sector to use social media/networks and the www.

When Learning City York (and Yortime) came onboard, I was joined by @mikeleighcooper. He shares the responsibility of organizing/publicizing the event, inviting surgeons and most importantly – documenting the event via audio/video podcasts. Most of the photos and interviews in this post have been taken by him.

Now that there are two of us, we have room to experiment with the concept in the following ways:

Hyperlocal surgeries

The voluntary sector is not restricted to any particular socio-economic background. This is why we were keen to test the idea of holding surgeries at different locations to attract a wider audience, different interest groups and so on. After an initial survey that considered various factors – interest from surgeons, easy access to the internet and even parking facilities, we settles on Priory Street Centre and the Explore library. The next task was to try and find the right frequency. If the event was held too frequently we knew that interest would wane and turnout would drop. So we decided to go ahead with the following – two surgeries a month, on the first and last Wednesday. One at Priory Street and the other at Micklegate. A surgery is held every two weeks (and one month apart at a location). This approach has produced some interesting results, perhaps I will go into the details in a separate post (to prevent this one from getting even longer).

A shared networking space

As I mentioned earlier, we don’t always get a huge turnout at a surgery. There have been times when many people signed on but only a fraction turned up. This got us thinking about how we can use the time during the surgery more constructively. The idea behind using the surgeries as a networking space is based on the following principle – to bring together surgeons from different backgrounds, from IT experts who are used to dealing with customers, to students who are interested in the geeky aspects of social media and others who are just starting up their own business. When you bring together such an eclectic mix of keen, enthusiastic people it is natural that constructive conversations will take place. And so they have. Once again I will go into the details in a separate post, or provide a downloadable case study. What I would like to mention is that at one particular event we managed to get the marketing manager from iPadio to visit York and provide demonstrations on using their service for ‘phlogging’.

An important issue related to the surgery is what happens afterwards? How do we continue to provide support to visitors? Would it be in the form of answering emails, setting up a facebook group, or collating the various issues that have been discussed as a FAQ on a wordpress blog? To be honest we were wary of the pressure that the first option would place us under. After all, we didn’t want to end up running a help-desk for the entire city.

Based on the feedback forms we collected, it seems people were keen on returning to the surgery for further information and advice rather than accessing help online. There is also the tricky business of handling commercial enquiries (setting up a website etc.) generated by the surgeries. These often come via email to me just after an event. As organizers, both Mike and I distance ourselves from them and direct visitors to the list of surgeons who were at that particular event.

The surgeries will resume in September and for the next few months we will continue the format of two events a month at Priory Street and Explore library. In the past couple of months we have been trying to reach out to new audiences. Now our focus is to follow up on the visitors who have attended so far and encourage them to return. We will continue to try and find new ways to promote the event and access different audiences and are looking into the possibility of getting the local radio networks/press to publicize the event. We are also trying to simplify the registration process. Whereas in the past we have asked people to register via eventbrite, from now on we will encourage people to turn up on the day. This might create organizational problems during the event, nonetheless we want to give it a go.

Despite all the effort we have put in, I am pretty sure there is still a sizeable chunk of the voluntary sector in York who have never heard of the social media surgeries. Both Mike and I are up for the challenge, we also have the continued support of Learning City York and Yortime. Most importantly, we have onboard with us some fantastic surgeons who are extremely generous with their time! A special thank you to some of the regulars – John Irving, Kadie Armstrong, Dan Croxen John and Dom Smith.

I will leave you with an interview with visitor Karen Michaelson who runs Circle Dance in York. The interview was conducted and recorded by Mike.

You can contact me via email or twitter if you would like to volunteer as a surgeon or attend the next surgery which will be held on the first Wednesday of September. Alternatively, you can register at the eventbrite website.

If you are keen on hosting a surgery in your city, be sure to get in touch with @johnpopham , @podnosh or @watfordgap who have championed the social media surgeries across a number of cities in the UK. You can also visit this excellent website for more information.

Poster Women, images courtesy zubaanbooks.com

I have been commissioned to work on a rather interesting project that will eventually take shape as a living archive for the Poster Women project by Zubaan Books. I shall explain what I mean by ‘living’, but first, here are a few details about Poster Women. As explained on this website, this project began with the idea of locating and archiving as many posters of the feminist movement in India as possible. The archive now includes over 1500 posters on diverse themes such as violence, the environment, religion and communalism and so on. You can get a sense of the scale of the project here.

My connection with this project goes back a few years, I was first approached by Jaya Bhattacharji (who was with Zubaan at the time) in early 2006 to create a website to accompany the exhibition that was touring the globe. I have now been asked to develop a platform where all the material can be made available online to the general public. There is additional dimension to this project, the Zubaan team have also been collecting artwork by women from rural India that focuses on socialist and feminist messages. The objective is to show that women from rural communities are aware of and have opinions on contemporary issues. Therefore, the archive will have a separate curated space which will showcase the art that comes in many forms – paintings, murals, objects and so on.

Living archive

Although there has been a thorough attempt to document details/legacy of every poster, there are still some items for which very little information is available. This is where the ‘living’ element comes into play. You see, Zubaan is hoping to source information about these posters from visitors to the archive. This opens the possibility of sourcing individual recollections, personal stories and narratives about people’s involvement with the feminist movement in India. I feel these individual voices sitting alongside the posters will continually shape the archive. So at the end of the day, we are not looking at a static entity where visitors are passive recipients, nor are we looking at a censored space. No doubt, there will be some level of moderation, but the archive will (hopefully) be host to different voices and opinions of all colours.

It also goes without saying that the archive will make use of a social media platform. In fact, this is the other bit of my job specification, to create a strategy for staff to promote the project and interact with audiences via social media. I find this particularly interesting/challenging. Using social media successfully is all about identifying the context and taking ownership of a virtual space in order to shape/mould it in any way possible to initially attract and subsequently engage with people from relevant networks/interests/beliefs. I have done a few wee social media projects with organizations and individuals from the creative sector in the past, this the first time I will be working to develop a living archive for a project of this scale.

We have set the start date in a couple of weeks time. I expect to come across a fair few surprises and insights (through the material, and working alongside some terrific people). I shall continue to post updates via this blog. In the meanwhile, if you have anything to say about this project, perhaps some advice and suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment.

Stress management in schools

Theme 1: Self-awareness and stress management

So what’s going to happen? Well, the workshops focus on two very different themes – breath awareness and language skills. The former is related to my research and the subsequent work I carried out in Japan. The idea is to introduce children to simple stress management skills they can use in any situation. Is it relevant? Most definitely. As I have said many times, I feel stress has become a ubiquitous commodity and there are very few means in mainstream education for students to become aware and manage it. I will go into details about the format in a separate post. I would like to add that this is quite a significant opportunity. Other than than the time I conducted the 12-week pilot study at a primary school in York to evaluate the breath-control ICT device, there has been little opportunity to work with schools in the UK.

Theme 2: Language Skills

The second workshop is focused on language skills. When it comes to speaking, reading and understanding different languages – I am a bit of a mongrel. My Hindi and English are fluent (As most bilingual people tend to, I too have been known to break out into ‘Hinglish’ a weird combination of Hindi and English). I have basic/intermediary Japanese skills and have a limited understanding of Punjabi, Bengali and Urdu. I have recently started learning Dutch (for no reasons other than to have fun making guttural sounds). I feel the act of ‘speaking’ a language is a culmination of a number of soft-skills such as confidence, self-belief and flexible thinking. And as is well established, the ability to speak myriad languages is a gateway to multicultural experiences, knowledge and insights (sounds rather melodramatic but it is true). So what’s going to happen? Well, rather than focus on a particular language or on the tedious bits, I will be working with the children (who are learning French and German) to construct a multi-lingual story via prezi. I hope this will be a collaborative experience, they have as much to ‘teach’ me as I have to them. Incidentally, this is a principal I follow for all my workshops. There is a lot more fun to be had by diving into the session and working closely with the participants, as compared to following the old-school model of standing in the front of the class and issuing orders.

I have a number of activities/games planned. Once again, I will go into the details of the format in a separate post. As I am a fan of using technology (in the right context), I think prezi will come in very handy. As a presentation tool, it can bring words, phrases and sentences to life through simple movements. Take a look at the lazy man’s example I have prepared below. I do hope to create something slightly more sophisticated than this working with children during the workshop.

I am quite excited (and a little bit nervous). As I said, there are a couple of weeks to go, so if you have any advice, suggestions or comments, I would be grateful if you would leave them in the form of a comment underneath this post. Let me know if there is something you don’t understand or if you feel I should incorporate anything particular in either session. Hope to hear from you guys!

A screenshot from the game

Finally, after 3.5 years of research and the subsequent hunt for a collaborator, I have previewed a prototype version of the breath-control game at Shift Happens – The Arts, Learning and Technology conference that is held in York every year.

This year’s event was held between July 5-6. I was invited to deliver a brief talk about my work and the organizers very kindly allowed me to preview my game across the two days. We had over 30 people try the game and the vast majority of the response was extremely positive. Perhaps what is most important to me is that most people ‘got’ the objective of the game without getting into tedious explanations. This is what I had been aiming for right from the start. To create a simple, straightforward and intuitive system for breath-awareness and its subsequent control. The game play reinforces the relationship between breath-control and stress-management.

We did have to provide a brief induction, which is to be expected. But the primary instruction to play the game was – Just make the little fishies go away! I never thought i’d spend an entire day telling some very clever people to do this.

Doing things differently

One of the best things about The Gateway project is the briefing document that was given to me by the university – to create a web based platform that encourages students to develop a sense of readiness for opportunity. This brief captures the central premise of my work, to use the WWW as a medium for reflection, self-awareness and discourse.

A fair amount of time has passed since that initial meeting and several key developments have taken place. We now have a small team in place – an wee army of enthusiastic people who are really committed to the project at an ideological level. There is also a consensus that in order to achieve what we have set out to do, we need to do things differently. So we are examining the various relationships that the website has to facilitate and eventually how the intended audience of students, academic staff and external agencies will use it.

Given my love to think in sets of 3 and equations (not sure why) I came up with a sitemap concept which was quite well received by everyone at the university. Why not make the intended relationship explicit through the primary navigation – students + businesses = opportunities, and then use the secondary level navigation to define the various levels at which we want this relationship to work. I really enjoy this sort of narrative building through navigation, and I’ve found that most people relate to it.

Anyway, coming to the point of doing things differently. When we sat down as a group and discussed the navigation framework, we started thinking about the actual relationships and trying to facilitate them through the website. This led to a very interesting discussion about sourcing content, which is where we came up with some very interesting suggestions. Now I cannot go into the details of what we discussed (for understandable reasons) but in brief, we have introduced yet another parameter – collaboration. Looking at the development and maintenance of the website as a collaborative effort. Of course there is tremendous precedence for such a concept, the entire social media movement. But given the fact that The Gateway is a university project and will be hosted on the university server, we definitely don’t have that level of freedom to just throw caution to the wind and ask students to take over. This is why we are currently working on a model of whereby we can come up with collaborative contracts – get students onboard and make them stakeholders, so they have a say in the important decisions related to the Gateway. Again, I shall not go too much into the details, but as you can imagine, this is quite exciting. I shall endeavor to keep you posted of any exciting developments.

1/ Yortime Web Surgeries: I have been commissioned by Learning City York (a city wide consortium which includes the City of York Council) to delivery a blueprint for a grassroots digital literacy initiative to engage voluntary organizations and community groups in the city. The project is well underway and will come to an end sometime in late October/early November. I have a host of responsibilities, one of which is to facilitate an open dialogue between disparate groups. This is exciting stuff with some interesting challenges.

2/ Kyokusen Yokocho : This project (for a Japanese client) has recently come to an end. I developed a conceptual framework and engagement strategy for an online curated space to showcase contemporary illustration and design to the Japanese audience. The project has an international dimension as it aims to attract artists from across the globe. Amongst other things, the site will feature exclusive interviews, themed selections and will also offer tutorials. The strategy has been put into practice and I am quite keen to see how the site develops over the next couple of months.

3/ Digital Footprints: Over the past couple of months I have been playing with a workshop format that uses social media as a means for introspection and self-awareness. The idea is to encourage participants to shape Digital Identities which can be put to good use in order to achieve professional and personal goals. Rather than focussing on operational aspects and simply jumping onto the social media bandwagon, the workshops focus on soft skills and values. Needless to say this is quite a tricky concept. However, I have been extremely fortunate to meet some very clever, progressive people who have commissioned to run a few sessions as part of student/enterprise development initiative within their universities. These first few sessions have been quite successful. I even got one participant saying that he found the workshop (and I quote) – fantastic!

4/ Opportunities Gateway: Work on the OG is going well. Over the few months my involvement with the project has grown considerably. Once again I am very fortunate to work alongside some dynamic people who are very inspiring in the way they operate. I will provide more details about this project soon. This past week I found out that I am expected to go on a reconnaissance trip to a dozen or so cities in/around Yorkshire over the next couple of days! I am quite looking forward to that.

5/ Teaching : And finally, most of my teaching commitments are coming to an end. I teach at a number of HEIs on courses such as Media Enterprise and Creative Digital Collaboration. Students from the ME course had their presentations a few days ago. There were a couple of other members of staff present to judge them. I am quite happy to say that they were all thrilled by the quality of the work and the confidence exuded by most students. I am very keen on encouraging a reflective process as I think self-awareness is key to the realization and subsequent ownership of aspirations. Looking at the students talk about their work, it was obvious they had put a lot of thought into it and were much more aware of their professional skills and goals, which was an absolute delight for me to see.

Right… I am sure I have missed out a few minor details here and there, but I hope to be a bit more regular in posting updates.

Cover Art from the Solus 3 album

Time to take a break from educational projects and talk about other work. I am happy to announce that work on the Solus 3 project is going well. This time I am working with the very talented @hyggedesigns to create the album artwork and a website for the band which hails from London.

The album, The Sky Above The Roof, will be available for purchase on iTunes in a couple of weeks time and I strongly recommend you get a copy. Each track is packed with such wonderful tension, there is a story bursting to be told! Every track could very well be a unique voice in a complex tale. This is truly atmospheric music folks.

A few weeks ago on my way to Sheffield when I put the album on, the journey took on a very interesting hue. Everyone in the train carriage became a character actor with a bit-part. Anyway, that is enough from me. I will put out an announcement on twitter when the new site is up and running. In the meantime you can sample a track from the album:

Blow Harp from The Sky Above The Roof

@Solus3 are on Twitter if you wish to follow them.

The image used in this post is taken from the album artwork which has been created by Jan Dunning. The release will be available as a vinyl, a CD and through iTunes.

Routes into enterprise

This post is part of the ongoing commentary on the workshops I am conducting with Media Studies students at York St John University. The workshops are based on the Digital Footprints programme I have developed for HE, FE and Secondary Schools. You can read more about it by clicking here.

What is the larger picture?
In case this is the first post you are reading about the project, I have included a brief description of what is going on. I am working with second year media studies students at York St John University to create a web-presence for one of their departmental magazines. The students have been divided into 7 groups and each will pitch their idea for the web-presence. Along the way, they are also required to define an identity for their group by establishing the context within which they are operating. They also have to create a chronological record of their work/thinking through a blog. This will have an impact on their pitch.

Week 2!
We are now on week 2 of the programme. The initial exercise of self-reflection and subsequent formation of digital identities through the use of keywords produced some interesting results. At first it was difficult for the students to take a step back and reflect on their strengths and professional aspirations. But after a lot of discussion most of them have achieved some degree of self-awareness. This has had an impact on the way they are communicating their ideas to other members of a group. When I walk around the room I am happy to see some engaging debates taking place.

One voice…
Although individual students are aware of their professional aspirations, some groups are finding it difficult to merge these into a single, coherent voice. There are a number of reasons that can account for this, but I would like to focus on one particular aspect. Let me take the example of a group that includes an aspiring business manager, artist, fashion designer and a public relations officer. When it comes to communicating their professional aspirations to the other members, each student has mentioned a very specific career that is based on their perceptions of it. For example, fashion designers are glamorous, public relations officers lead exciting lives and so on. Unfortunately, every other member in the group has a different perception of the career, which has created a lot of confusion. This issue has been conveniently side-stepped by clubbing all careers into an umbrella term – marketing. So the group decided to work as a marketing agency.

From Marketing to Trend Spotting
I know just about enough of marketing as a profession to realize that it involves a period of rigorous academic study accompanied by extensive field work. When I put this to the students they were a bit disappointed. So we started discussing other career options which could act as a conduit to their marketing career. Along the way the students began voicing their professional aspirations in more personal/subjective terms. It emerged that every member was quite attached to the idea of trend-spotting. This immediately opened a number of additional avenues – A&R professionals for music companies etc. Once again students were disappointed by the lack of immediacy. You cannot just become an A&R executive. So we started looking at entrepreneurial avenues. Since they were all interested in trend spotting, I asked them to have a look at whatFace Hunter does. The man has built up an international reputation for himself by obsessively taking photographs of people from across the world and cataloguing them on his website.

This struck a chord with the group who were able to see a tangible/credible career based on their personal aspirations that did not fall into a pre-defined category. All ideas about marketing agencies and such were abandoned and the group began discussing how they could contribute their individual insights to create a convincing online trend-spotting agency.

Enterprise Development – scaling professional aspirations
This brings me to the point that even though enterprise development has gained a lot of importance in HEIs there is too much focus on the end-result rather than the journey. In order to become successful entrepreneurs students don’t necessarily have to conform to pre-existing standards. There needs to be a greater focus on self-reflection and awareness. This coupled with flexible thinking can create a readiness for opportunity rather than a sense of expectancy. Realize what you are good at, think of ways through which you can achieve professional satisfaction and then go for it!