Me and Malcolm McLaren

This is the story behind that photograph. Malcolm McLaren was notorious for a variety of reasons. He was in a relationship with the avant garde fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, introduced fetish-wear, managed various punk rock bands including the Sex Pistols, and was agent provocateur and innovator in the art and music scenes for decades. It could be claimed that he was not only the originator of punk rock, but also one of the prime movers in the New Wave and Hip Hop music genres. He earned the nickname 'The Godfather of Punk' during this period, but in his later years, he seemed to have mellowed out to a more avuncular version of his younger restless self.

When I heard that he was to speak at the 2009 Handheld Learning Festival in London, I made sure I had a front row seat. I wanted to hear what McLaren would say about learning and about technology. Further, what would be his take on education and its place in society? Would he be controversial, caustic, conciliatory? Predictably, McLaren did not disappoint, polarising the audience with a very personal, sardonic and provocative account of his own learning journey. His reference to Karoake culture resonated - where anyone through the medium of technology, especially the reality TV shows, can become famous ... for simply being in the public eye for long enough. His key message was that failure and messiness are the key to the best kinds of learning. None of us at the time were to know that he had very little time left to live. A few days after this public appearance, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, and died 6 months later, in a hospital in Switzerland.

I took several photographs of Malcolm during his speech. The one I considered to be the best was posted up onto my Flickr account, and I labelled it for free reuse as I always do, under Creative Commons licencing. I also used the image in my subsequent blog post entitled Karaoke Culture. It turned out to be one of the last photographs ever taken of him. Later, someone saw my photograph on Flickr and uploaded it for use on his Wikipedia page. It was thereafter mirrored on all the other foreign language versions of Wikipedia. When Malcolm McLaren died, guess where many of the journals and newspapers went to find copyright free images of him?

This is why newspapers such as the Caledonian Mercury and the London Daily News, websites such as Shapers of the 80's and Compas, and Goldmine all carried the image when they reported on McLaren's funeral. It appears that my name (credited with the photograph) will forever be linked to that of Malcolm McLaren. What have I learnt from this experience? Just being in the right place at the right time is not always enough. Posting your content on social media sites and making them available for free use and reuse is not only an equitable way of sharing the love. It is often a precursor for widespread amplification of that content. Whether or not something goes viral is left to the whims of the social web, but giving your content away for free can give it an excellent chance. 


Me and Malcolm McLaren by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Atkins diet

Zenna Atkins is a particularly influential figure in the world of British education, yet her personal learning journey has been chequered. It was refreshing then to see her give the opening keynote at this year's Handheld Learning conference, in London.

Atkins is actually more of a 'mum' than she is the chair of OfSTED. At least this is how she portrays herself, and she laces her narrative with school from a parent's perspective, rather than sticking to the standard mantra that emanates from many government appointees. She has also been hailed by the press as 'a failed student who is now in charge of inspecting schools'. Zenna Atkins focused on the consumer power that has emerged around Web 2.0 services. It is both disconcerting and liberating she said, that patients often know more about their condition than their GPs, due to trawling around on Google. It will only be a short time, she warned, before a similar situation arises in schools. Teachers are often lagging behind when it comes to good use of learning technologies, but worse, they can no longer aford to represent themselves as the sole arbiters of knowledge.

Atkins cited an incident where her son streamed a live video of his classroom to her at home using his mobile phone. She was appalled to see a small riot raging unchecked in the classroom, whilst the teacher sat doing nothing, with his feet up on the desk. Incensed she phoned the school and alerted them to the impending disaster, and a senior member of staff was summoned. The lookout posted at the door told the teacher and when the senior staff member entered, all was calm and business-like. The school denied anything untoward had happened, and took disciplinary action against her son. Atkins was able to show the senior staff member evidence that her son was 'telling the truth', but her point is challenging... The power is now in the hands of the parents, regardless of whether schools ban mobile devices or not. The entire educational system is being challenged when parents are able to eavesdrop into classrooms using the technology that is currently available. What will happen when this becomes common practice? Good question.

Read also an excellent summary of the rest of Zenna Atkins' speech (by Terry Freedman).

All in hand

I have just returned from another excellent Handheld Learning conference in London. Because it was a conference focused on handheld technologies, I promised I would do an experiment and see if I could survive for three days without a laptop, and using only my newly acquired iPod Touch. Well, I survived, and some things worked, whilst other things were a little more problematic (the wifi service was second to none, by the way - congratulations to Graham Brown-Martin - pictured - and his team for this).

For example, I was able to Tweet live from the event, firstly with the standard Twitter application on my Safari web browser. A bright young thing then introduced me to EchoFon which I downloaded for free from the iPod App Store. This made my life a lot easier, and I was able to see more clearly what I was tweeting, who was responding to me, and I could also more easily reply, DM and RT other people's tweets. EchoFon used to be known as TwitterFon, and it's designed for mobile phone use, so it was ideal for the task.

Less easy was updating my blog which I found quite difficult. For some reason, Safari would not allow me to modify text once it was saved on Blogger. Not sure why that was, but James Clay showed me how to e-mail direct to my blog, including the posting of images as attachments, which I will try when I can pluck up enough courage.

I was also able to respond to e-mails until someone sent me 13 MB of pictures which clogged my university e-mail inbox, and then I couldn't send or receive anything. I would normally save the pictures onto my laptop, but of course, with only my iPod Touch this wasn't possible. Unless, of course, someone out there knows differently.

My hashtagging wasn't being picked up by the conference feed or Twitter either - someone told me that Echofon has some problems here, but I think there may be a more deep seated problem than that, and I'm sure someone out there has a solution...?

It was an interesting experiment to conduct, and I will do it again for other conferences. It was wonderful to not have to lug my laptop across airport lounges and drag it across London. Oh, what liberty, but at a small price of reduced functionality. More from the conference when I get some time to reflect and post my comments.

Karaoke culture

Handheld Learning 2009 has been special for a number of reasons, some of which I have already blogged about. But the opening keynote speeches this year, and one person in particular, took the proverbial biscuit. Malcolm McLaren is best known for his instigation of the punk movement in the UK in the 70s - the embodiment of anarchy, and is notorious as the manager of the iconic punk band the Sex Pistols. To invite him to speak at an event about mobile technologies in education would seem to be a little anachronistic, but speak he did, and he had a tremendous impact.

McLaren labels himself as an artist, which indeed if you examine his early history, is true. But he would be better labelled here as an agent provocateur - someone brought in to stir up emotion and cause a reaction. And that is exactly what he did. Looking more like an affable granfather than the angry man of punk, he took to the stage dressed in grey slacks, shirt and tie, and a comfortable wooley pullover. Gone were the wild corskscrew red locks, and the outlandish presence - it was almost as though he had assumed his place within the establishment. But nothing could be farther from the truth from the moment he opened his mouth and began to speak.

McLaren talked critically about the culture of Britain today - in his own words, often laced with profanity, it is a mediocre Karaoke culture - one in which there is no responsibility, and one in which reality shows hold sway, and instant success can be had for no real effort. This, he said was how the Blair government had functioned, and his remark about the inanity of Cool Brittania as a failed marketing ploy gained some audience approval. The instant gratification of the Karaoke culture, he suggested, was a huge problem for educators who are trying to instil a sense of achievement (even if it is a failure) into young minds.

His speech was at times rambling and self-absorbed as he reminisced over his time as a trainee wine taster, art student, musician and designer and eventually as instigator of the punk movement through his shop 'Sex', and his formation of the Sex Pistols. McLaren's ventures into the music and movie industries, and more recently, his full circle to return to his roots as an 'artist' have ensured he has been influential in all he has done, even though he is a self confessed educational failure. He has often been influential for the wrong reasons, and he admits that his forays into punk were calculated to destroy the comfortable complacency of middle class England and to challenge and undermine many of its social structures. He is a true anarchist in many ways, but is also perversely a part of the establishment, whether he accepts it or not. He has adopted the conventional, but without him, the present music and fashion industries may never have become what they are. Yes, the education system may have failed him utterly, but within his own account of his formative years, it is easy to spot how he also failed himself. He acknowledges this, but argues that failure in itself is not always a bad thing, and that the journey to discover oneself is sometimes more important. It was only when he became a student of art, he admitted, that he found his true identity.

McLaren had started his speech by admitting he knew very little about learning technologies. His parting comment though was telling, and resonated with many of his audience, even though many had been polarised. 'Don't becomes slaves to technology', he warned, 'see it for what it is. Use it as a tool, but don't become dependent upon it'.

Related posts

Authenticity vs Karaoke (Terry Freedman)

Malcolm McLaren and Education (Nick Kind)

Military-erotic wine-tasting education (mrjorgen Flickr video)

Edupunk won't go away... (Pontydysgu)

Camera-derie?

The new Nintendo DSi games console will be on sale in UK and US stores as early as first week in April. Here in the UK it is expected to retail for around £150, and will be available in any colour you like, as long as it's black (or white). It has already been available in Japan since November 2008, and has been selling like hot sushi (What?? - Ed.)

According to the report from Webuser, the new DSi still sports the familiar dual screen technology, one of which is a touch screen, but also comes with new features such as a 256 Mb storage space for games downloads. And get this - the DSi also has a pair of tiny cameras, one facing in and one facing out. Sounds like a cue for some cool videoconferencing, possibly in conjunction with Pictochat. Will the DSi cameras create opportinuties for some new forms of social interaction during games playing? Will DS gaming become the new social networking? What new forms of visual collaboration might emerge? We will have to wait and see. But I can't wait, so I will probably get one as soon as they are available in the UK stores. I don't have the yen to fly over to Tokyo, unfortunately. And I wonder if the excellent folk at the Handheld Learning Conference this year will be offering free ones for early bird registrations, like they did last year?