if:book uk

Secondary English – Imagine that

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:04:48 +0000

Secondary English – Imagine that
Classroom | Published in TES Magazine on 7 November, 2008 | By: Jo Klaces
Move away from conventional essay writing and dare to try something new, says Jo Klaces
My Year 8 class was bored. The children had done myths, dabbled in poetry and toyed with Shakespeare. They were bright and sparky, but undoubtedly keener on MSN and Facebook than writing essays. We wanted to tap into this enthusiasm for talking about themselves in cyberspace and channel it into a new sort of public document – an ebook about being a lost 12-year-old in a city.
And so, with generous funding from Booktrust (www.booktrust.co.uk), we came up with a scenario that mixed modern modes of communication with threads of old stories and urban legend.
To kick off the class, we received a letter from an organisation called the Hauser Institute (researching forgetfulness, recollection and identity loss). Both the letter and the institute were products of the fertile imaginations of our cyber partners, the Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book) and Toby Jones, the actor.
The letter offered pupils the opportunity to help directly on an extraordinary project – the education and development of a feral child who was in the care of the institute.
The boy had been discovered in the basement of a crumbling mansion, where he had been abandoned to fend for himself. Improbably enough, the boy, though mute, was able to write words but his text lacked form and sense.
Our class turned out to be the ideal forum to provoke and understand the child because their age, ethnic diversity and proficiencies seemed close to the boy’s own profile.
They received texts written by the boy to analyse. There was a blog to look at and add to, plus podcasts from the institute. Once we used Skype texting to communicate on-the-spot with the institute too. The pupils threw themselves into communicating with “Beny”, as he became known, and puzzled over what helpful information they could give him.
They emailed pictures of their hairstyles, plus jokes and stories about their lives and tried to pinpoint what was distinctive about being 12.
Beny (via our cyber mates in London) replied over the internet in the language that the pupils had given him.
When it was over we were left with an extraordinary online, Wikipedia-type document (still in progress) of our pupils’ lives now. They don’t believe Beny is real anymore – but they know that they created him and, as with all the best fictional characters, he is in the classroom with them still. They take a parental pride in him and the group’s achievements.
Jo Klaces is a Creative Agent at Queensbridge School in Birmingham, and is on the board of the National Literacy Association.
YOU CAN DO IT TOO
- Be inspired by our story and blog at: www.hauserfound.blogspot.com.
- Find willing partners to personally respond to the pupils’ emails.
- Look at a selection of film clips from L’Enfant Sauvage, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and Superman to provide context for the idea of a “found” child.

IMAGINATION AND DIGITISATION – article by Chris Meade from The Bookseller, LBF edition, April 2009

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:14:32 +0000

Will it be the Kindle or the Sony Reader or the iRex or the iTouch or the iWash (that’s the one you can read in the bath) which catches on as the reading device of the future? A far more interesting question is what will we be reading on it.
2008 was the year of umpteen editions of Frankenstein and a clutch of other popular classics reformatted for every new format going. I read The Time Machine and Sherlock Holmes on my iTouch on holiday, then Anna Karenina on my Sony Reader. Reading like this reminded me that a book isn’t primarily an object, but an experience which happens deep inside us, the paperback or laptop simply the means by which it’s ingested.
Yes, the codex is still, as they say, a neat piece of kit, but it really does have its limitations; you can’t write comments in the margin to be read and added to by other readers around the world, like you can on www.thegoldennotebook.org, where eight readers conversed together as they read Lessing’s masterpiece online; you can’t find new friends in a novel or join in the story, though you can in the online communities of fan fiction and Alternate Reality games ; you can’t write bits of a paper book yourself, or find that the beginning has been rewritten by the time you reach the end, as you could in the creative chaos of the wiki-novel One Million Penguins. A paper book won’t include moving pictures, a soundtrack, animated text, or links directly to other texts and places.
And you may not want to. But what a shame that current e-books are drab text on the grey, e-inked page, publishers cautious of radical departures in cash strapped times despite a rich history of experimentation in digital literature, from the first hypertext poetry to Kate Pullinger’s Inanimate Alice and the recently lauded Wetellstories.co.uk. We’re still at the beginning of new literary and cultural forms, and the trade needs to attend to seeking out and nurturing the Austens / Joyces / Mozarts / Fellinis / Dylans of the digital who will seize on these new forms as their natural canvas, finding the perfect blend of constraints and attributes to help them express a compelling personal vision and make a masterpiece or even a bestseller.
This is the first networked recession. Previous downturns cast workers onto the scrap heap of history, now the unemployed may be broke, but can still keep in touch with colleagues on Facebook, google information about their field of interest, tweeting and blogging their opinions to all and sundry. As long as you can afford wi-fi and a laptop there’s a free library online for us all to savour in the time we gain in exchange for loss of wages. The downturn provides a breeding ground for new, grass roots ventures in storytelling and the growth of a dynamic and artistically subtle collaborative culture.
In September 2007 I set up if:book London, a small think and do tank, inspired by the Institute for the Future of the Book, founded in New York by longstanding digital publisher Bob Stein. We’ve just launched songsofimaginationanddigitisation.net which celebrates William Blake, a radical, self publishing, multimedia visionary, in a digitally illuminated form. As the chair of the Blake Society Tim Heath says (out loud) in the book, “Blake was always using new technologies, often abusing technologies, not for the sake of an interest in the technology per se, but what he could use it for. He believed that, rather like learning a language… if you speak a different language maybe you ask different questions. And the language of the digital age is one that Blake would have pursued.”
It’s strange that it’s taken so long for writers to want to create in this way, given that so many sit at machines on which mixing film, sound, links and text is easier than it once was to tippex out misprints. Technologists have imported literary terms into the digital space, fashioning bookshelves, netbooks, facebooks and bookmarks; it’s time for writers to stop harping back and look at what’s happening now, what use can be made of new tools to bring words to life.
It’s not just future generations who will lead transliterate lives – we’re doing it now: googling this, watching that, listening to this, talking into this – then going to bed to read for a few minutes before our heads hit the pillows. After years working to promote literature as CEO of Booktrust and the Poetry Society, I now believe that there is more chance of keeping the reading habit a vital part of our cultural life if people are able to do their fiction on the same console they do their other stuff on. I simply don’t believe that most of those people who tell me so vehemently they prefer pages to screen actually spend their evenings leafing through tomes. The book has already been pushed out of the front room and sent up to bed.
if:book’s education project The Motfothotbook involves a curator from the 3rd millennium who sends back ‘litch bits’ via a flatpack time machine. These pieces of digital literature include animated Gawain, extracts from Darwin’s Origin of the Species recited in Second Life, and stories of the future commissioned from living writers such as Cory Doctorow, Naomi Alderman and Jacob Polley, imagining what literature might look like over the next thousand years. The project is being piloted now and evidence so far suggests it appeals to those Year 8 students who aren’t naturally drawn to reading, and engages them with rich, complex language before they can jump to conclusions about it.
Next we’re launching the if:so press, a production house for transliterate reading experiences which unfold in real time. That may sound weirdly futuristic, but it’s bookgroups which have shaped a new concept of reading as a shared experience, dealing with one book per month, culminating in food and wide-ranging conversations. We’re wondering how to curate some new kinds of writing to be shared in this way. You want to experience one? If so press here… Oh, but of course you can’t – this is printed on paper.

Book seller magazine- Digital Focus

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:00:30 +0000

Digitisation is a huge challenge to industries engaged in making and selling books made of paper, but what are its implications for writers and readers? These are the questions if:book exists to explore.
if:book has already undertaken research for Arts Council England on digital possibilities for literature organisations, and is setting up a network to support them through changing times. The organisation has also been involved in a range of experiments with new forms of writing and publishing. Projects include Songs of Imagination and Digitisation, an online illuminated book inspired by William Blake. Thegoldennotebook.net put the entirety of Doris Lessing’s epic novel online with comments of readers alongside the text. With completelynovel.com and a team of writers, if:book recently made the 24hr book, collaboratively written, edited and printed over one weekend.
The HOTbook is if:book’s schools project, funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Trust, which imagines how literature might develop over the next thousand years.
For this month’s Bookseller Digital Focus, if:book asked some of its 21st-century experts to use their time machines and then report back from the near and far-flung future.

Bill Thompson, journalist and expert commentator on the BBC World Service’s “Digital Planet” pictures the world beyond Google; Timo Hannay, publishing director of Macmillan’s Nature.com, imagines the intelligent book; Naomi Alderman, winner of the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers for her novel Disobedience (Viking) and writer for games such as alternate reality game Perplex City, looks forward to new hybrid forms of writing; performance poet Ross Sutherland muses on the future for his artform; if:book’s director Chris Meade visits the Unlibrary; and Sasha Hoare, who has worked on literature and education projects at the South Bank, for Booktrust and with Michael Rosen during his children’s laureateship, explains in detail how HOTbook may develop present and future writers in schools.

Bill Thompson reports back from a post-Google world
Burning the books to keep power running to the servers had seemed like such a good plan in the dark days after the grid failed, but the librarians soon came to regret it once the last vellum-bound manuscript had joined the law journals, parliamentary records and works of 21st-century fiction in the ever-hungry furnaces of the power room.
After six months it was clear that the grid was never coming back, that the post-industrial world would be a post-electrical one. They would rebuild, of course. People always rebuilt, though the new society would not simply be a replica of what had gone before, the com’era, dov’era (how it was, where it was), that the Venetians insisted on as they rebuilt the campanile in St Mark’s Square in 1901. It would be different, perhaps even better.
But it would have no printed books. The great scanning had seen to that, especially after Google persuaded the US courts to amend copyright law and allow it full rights to digitise and exploit any printed text, and authors realised that under the final Book Search settlement it made more sense to abandon publishers and simply send their finished manuscript to the Googleplex.
No books had been printed for a decade, with every bookshop now operating as an advertising-funded GoogleZone. No books had been read, it seemed, except as pixels on the screen of a networked device that was connected straight to the Pagebrinary—all the world’s knowledge at only a eurocent a page. And the books that remained were now mostly gone, a final burnt offering to the gods of the data centres.
And then it began to happen, first a trickle and then a flood. People arrived at the library clutching carrier bags, or boxes or in one case a massive traveller’s trunk, all packed with books that had been put to one side, left unopened on shelves or simply lain undisturbed among discarded computers, phones and indestructible CDs and DVDs.
The people emerged with their books, and offered them to the library, restocking the city’s memory with textbooks and poetry and works of fiction. Not everything, not enough, and rather too many trashy airport novels and books about mystical intrigues involving the Catholic Church and western powers. But enough to offer a chance of rebooting one corner of civilisation a bit faster than the others, enough to get things started.
“If there was hope”, the librarian muttered, “it lies in the pages”. He was sure he’d heard that before, somewhere.