Publishing is a tough industry to be in, no doubt about it. Things are rapidly changing and market forces are being swayed beyond the traditional publisher’s influence. Things are now so easy to share and distribute, that these old gate-keepers can no longer steer what people are looking at.
However, e-books are being subjected to this, so that instead of paper being pushed around and controlled, instead digital files are being controlled and again, authors are being expected to go through the publisher, instead of dealing directly with their audience.
This article (monki.biz/1r) deals with these issues and in an attempt to educate people, perhaps try and free them from the constraints of big business so that they can start to author themselves more.
Worse still, is the new apple iauthor software from apple, which will allow the writer to only release their writing through itunes – creepy or what?
Jenni Russell has written this piece on what might be going wrong in education.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/28/education.labour
"On the day before the Commons rose last week, the government quietly issued its response to the children's select committee, which had spent months taking evidence on whether the focus on testing was distorting children's education. The committee's report had been thorough and merciless. It concluded that while England needed a testing system, the existing one was damaging. It turned students off learning, and was in urgent need of reform."
and…
"This culture of brazen denial comes right from the top. In an interview last month, Balls was asked about the fact that, in most schools, even seven-year-olds spend much of their year being anxiously coached and drilled in Sats techniques. They are put under such pressure because teachers' jobs and schools' futures depend on good results. That's the system of reward and punishment his department has constructed. But Balls simply denied it was true - and claimed he would be horrified if it were."
I managed to get a nice little Palm Z22 cheap a couple of days ago, which gives us the opportunity of paperless caching. We’ve been out a couple of days this half-term with it and it’s almost revolutionary!.
Using Pocket Queries (PQ) you can download a lot of geocaches in one file, and then run them through a nice application called GPXSpinner. This looks at each cache and creates some nice html for it. This html is then parsed through to plucker which parses all the html and creates nice links between all the pages and then creates a .pdb file which can be installed on the palm (and viewed with plucker’s own viewer).
We were out today, and because we had a nice database of caches on the palm, could roam around with all the information we needed. Cool 
I’ve just returned from Kingswood, an activity centre on the Isle of Wight. It was pretty exhausting, with activities starting around 9:30 am (with an early rise for breakfast) and then finishing at 9pm.
The children thoroughly enjoyed the activities, including Quad-biking, archery, climbing, zip-wire, abseiling (both from the tower in the photo) and Night-line (following a length of rope whilst blindfolded).
Happy birthday Pete – sorry it’s taken us a whole week to sort this pic, but it’s worth it. Hope you got some sleep in the end. Trugs, Ads, Treasure and Zakster.
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Your Inner European is Dutch! |
 Open minded and tolerant. You’re up for just about anything. |
Isaac wants to show you the boat he made out of Jenga blocks.
Click the image for the full version.
