iSlate or something like it

Posted on January 2, 2010 by slav

Apple is set to announce their next big thing on January 26 (now ‘slated’ for January 27). Variously called the iSlate, the iGuide or generically called ‘the tablet’, rumours abound what it will do precisely, but many writers seem to agree that it will at least do for books what the iPod did for music. However, a colour eReader with internet access, video, etc. is seen as being just the beginning. As Apple get so many things oh so right, what more can we expect? A few experts reveal their thoughts.

Jesse McDougall reports in the Huffington Post that Apple’s iSlate will be a Kindle killer:

When it comes to the launch of new and exciting techno-gadgets, I–and perhaps, we all–have been spoiled by Apple. Yes, they’ve gotten it wrong on occasion, but so often, they get it so right. They’ve repeatedly raised the bar, and our expectations. Perhaps that’s why, when I first saw the unauthorized, leaked images of Amazon’s first Kindle on the web all those years ago, I thought surely they were the creation of an internet ne’er-do-well. I laughed, because I thought I got the joke. “Yeah!” I said. “That DOES look like it’s from 1980! Good one, you internet pranksters you.”

But so it was.

In the days of high-speed streaming video, 5-second song downloads, 30″ computer monitors, and a nation of media addicts, Amazon released this.

Amazon’s Kindle (along with all the other faux-paper e-ink readers) ignores the fact that all media is evolving–books included. These e-ink readers are nothing more than a cautious step between the old and the new. They’re too married to the formatting and failures of their paper predecessors to take full advantage of what’s possible. They’ll never be as good as paperbacks for quiet, un-powered reading. And they’ll never be as good as computers for multimedia content. Why offer a device that offers a poor version of two experiences?

By releasing an e-reader so hopelessly tied to the paper, Amazon gave Apple an opening to provide something better. If the latest swirl of rumors is true and Apple plans to release a tablet computer, or iSlate, early next year, you can bet your life it will put the Kindle to shame when it comes to digital content delivery. Any e-ink device simply will not be able to compete. I’m not going to reveal any names, but I have it on very good authority, for example, that–unlike the Kindle–the new Apple tablet will, indeed, have a color screen. Might it also … play video?! (Please pardon the sarcasm.)

Book publishers are feverishly searching for the best ways to pour their content into the new digital stream. And rightly so. I’ve argued here in the past that book publishers, as producers of a continuous stream of high-quality and edited content, are perfectly suited to capitalize on the new opportunities presented by the digital content revolution. Selling e-books has long been the most accepted method–and though I have my reservations–I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. I would argue, however, that the best e-books are certainly not Kindle e-books.

Book content should no longer be imprisoned by the limitations of paper. Digital books should include author interviews, instructional videos, pop-up definitions of esoteric terms, instant foreign translations, optional soundtracks, links to helpful web sites, and anything else publishers and authors can dream up to increase the value and effectiveness of their content.

What the rumored Apple iSlate represents for publishers and e-book readers is the ability to break free from the limitations of paper–which were so dutifully copied by Amazon and Sony–and provide book content to readers on a portable device with a screen big enough to be reasonable for reading long-form content.

I understand the arguments for the e-ink format: the non-back-lit screen is easy on the eyes, easy on battery life, etc. And since we spend upwards of ten hours a day staring at glaring screens–whether 30″ wide or glowing in your pocket– I can understand the argument for not wanting to read the latest vampire novel off yet another backlit screen. When I desire such a quiet reading experience I pick up the paperback. It is still the best at what it does. No electronic reader could ever truly duplicate the experience of reading off paper. So why try? When building a digital reader, build something different. Build something that offers book readers new material–and publishers a new revenue stream. With the coming of the iSlate, it looks like Apple may have finally done just that.

This was originally published on Jesse’s blog.

Jenny Luca passed on this lengthy but must-read post by John Gruber on Daring Fireball:

The Tablet

Thursday, 31 December 2009

Another former Apple executive who was there at the time said the tablets kept getting shelved at Apple because Mr. Jobs, whose incisive critiques are often memorable, asked, in essence, what they were good for besides surfing the Web in the bathroom.

—”Just a Touch Away, the Elusive Tablet PC”, The New York Times, 4 October 2009

Here’s the thimbleful of information I have heard regarding The Tablet (none of which has changed in six months): The Tablet project is real, it has you-know-who’s considerable undivided attention, and everyone working on it has dropped off the map. I don’t know anyone who works at Apple who doubts these things; nor do I know anyone at Apple who knows a whit more. I don’t know anyone who’s seen the hardware or the software, nor even anyone who knows someone else who has seen the hardware or software.

The cone of silence surrounding the project is, so far as I can tell, complete.1

The situation is uncannily similar to the run-up preceding the debut of the original iPhone in January 2007, including many of the same engineers and software teams at Apple — such as those who built the iPhone Mail, Calendar, and Safari apps — disappearing into a black hole. The iPhone remained a secret until Steve Jobs took it out of his jeans pocket on stage at Macworld Expo. All of which is to say that what follows is my conjecture. Pure punditry, not one of those smarmy “predictions” where I know full well in advance what’s going to happen.

I have a thousand questions about The Tablet’s design. What size is it? There’s a big difference between, say, 7- and 10-inch displays. How do you type on it? With all your fingers, like a laptop keyboard? Or like an iPhone, with only your thumbs? If you’re supposed to watch video on it, how do you prop it up? Holding it in your hands? Flat on a table seems like the wrong angle entirely; but a fold-out “arm” to prop it up, à la a picture frame, seems clumsy and inelegant. If it’s just a touchscreen tablet, how do you protect the screen while carrying it around? If it folds up somehow, how is it not just a laptop — why not put a hardware keyboard on the part that folds up to cover the display? (Everyone I know at Apple refers to it as “The Tablet”, but so far as I can tell, that’s because that’s what everyone calls it, not because anyone knows that it actually even is, physically, a tablet. And “The Tablet” most certainly is not the product name.) If it’s too big to fit in a pants pocket, how are you supposed to carry it around? And but if it doesfit in a pants pocket, how is it bigger enough than an iPod Touch to justify existing? And so on.

But there’s one question at the top of the list, the answer to which is the key to answering every other question. That question is this: If you already have an iPhone and a MacBook; why would you want this?

The epigraph I used to start this piece — the bit about Steve Jobs demanding that a tablet be useful for more than just reading on the can — indicates that Apple will release nothing without such an answer. I agree that such an answer is essential.

Successful new gadgets always seem to occupy a clearly defined place alongside, or replacing, existing devices. The Flip filled a previously empty niche for a small, cheap, simple video camera. How was the iPod better than existing portable music players? It fit 1,000 songs in your pocket, with a fun interface that let you find them easily. Why buy an iPhone to replace your existing mobile phone? Because there was a clear need for a modern handheld general-purpose computer.

But how much room is there between an iPhone (or iPod Touch) and a MacBook (or other laptop computer, running Windows or Linux or whatever)? What’s the argument for owning all three?

“I’d use it on the couch and lying in bed” is not a good answer. You can already use your iPhone orMacBook on the couch and in bed. It strikes me as foolish to market a multi-hundred-dollar device that people are expected to leave on their coffee table.

“It’s a Kindle killer” is not a good answer. If you think Apple is making a dedicated device for reading e-books and articles, you’re thinking too small. As profoundly reticent as Steve Jobs is regarding future Apple products, when he does speak, he’s often surprisingly revealing. David Pogue asked him about the Kindle a few months ago:

A couple of years ago, pre-Kindle, Mr. Jobs expressed his doubts that e-readers were ready for prime time. So today, I asked if his opinions have changed.

“I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing,” he said. “But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.”

He said that Apple doesn’t see e-books as a big market at this point, and pointed out that Amazon.com, for example, doesn’t ever say how many Kindles it sells. “Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.”

Of course, this is the same Steve Jobs who back in January 2008 told The New York Times’s John Markoff:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

One could reasonably argue that the “people don’t read” comment, taken at face value, suggests that Apple has no interest in that market, period.

I, however, would square the two remarks as follows: Not enough people read to make it worth creating a dedicated device that is to reading what the original iPod was to music. (Everyone, for practical definitions of “everyone”, listens to music.) But e-reading as one aspect among several for a general-purpose computing device — well, that’s something else entirely.

The pre-Touch iPod was (and remains) an enormous success. It changed the music industry and rejuvenated Apple. But it was and remains a dedicated device; originally focused on audio, now capable of the sibling feature of video.

The iPhone, on the other hand, was conceived and has flourished as a general-purpose handheld computing platform. It was not introduced as such publicly, and is not pitched as such in Apple’s marketing, but clearly that’s what it is. The iPhone was described by Jobs in his on-stage introduction as three devices in one: “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, a breakthrough Internet communicator”. Thus, it was clear what people would want to do with it: watch videos, listen to music, make phone calls, surf the web, do email.

The way Apple made one device that did a credible job of all these widely-varying features was by making it a general-purpose computer with minimal specificity in the hardware and maximal specificity in the software. And, now, through the App Store and third-party developers, it does much more: serving as everything from a game player to a medical device.

Do I think The Tablet is an e-reader? A video player? A web browser? A document viewer? It’s not a matter of or but rather and. I say it is all of these things. It’s a computer.

And so in answer to my central question, regarding why buy The Tablet if you already have an iPhone and a MacBook, my best guess is that ultimately, The Tablet is something you’ll buy insteadof a MacBook.

I say they’re swinging big — redefining the experience of personal computing.

It will not be pitched as such by Apple. It will be defined by three or four of its built-in primary apps. But long-term, big-picture? It will be to the MacBook what the Macintosh was to the Apple II.

I am not predicting that Apple is phasing out the Mac. (On the contrary, I’ve heard that Mac OS X 10.7 is on pace for a developer release at WWDC in June.) Like all Apple products, The Tablet will do less than we expect but the things it does do, it will do insanely well. It will offer a fraction of the functionality of a MacBook — but that fraction will be way more fun. The same Asperger-y critics who dismissed the iPhone will focus on all that The Tablet doesn’tdo and declare that this time, Apple really has f*$ked up but good. The rest of us will get in line to buy one.

The Mac is, and will remain, Apple’s answer to what you use to do everything.

The Tablet, I say, is going to be Apple’s new answer to what you use for personal portable general computing.

Put another way, let’s say instead of a MacBook and an iPhone, you’ve got an iMac and an iPhone, but you also want a portable secondary computer. Today, that portable from Apple (portable as opposed to the iPhone’s mobile) is a MacBook. With The Tablet, you’ll have the option of a device that will more closely resemble the iPhone than the iMac in terms of concept and the degree of technical abstraction.

The Tablet OS

The original 1984 Mac didn’t abstract away the computer — it made the computer itself elegant, simple, and understandable. Very, very little was hidden from the typical user. Mac OS X is vastly more complex technically and conceptually, as it must be due to the vastly increased complexity and capability of today’s hardware. But Mac OS X has always tried to have it both ways: a veneer of simplicity that doesn’t cover the entire surface of the system. The user-exposed file system is a prime example. On the 1984 Mac, the entire file system was exposed, but the entire file system fit on a 400 KB floppy disk. On Mac OS X, the /System/Library/folder, one of many exposed fiddly sections of the file system browsable in the Finder, contains over 90,000 items, not one of which a typical user should ever need to see or touch.

The iPhone OS offers a complete computing abstraction. Under the hood, it’s just as complex as Mac OS X. On the surface, though, it is even more simple and elegant than the original Mac. No technical complexity is exposed. Hierarchyis minimized. It relegates the file system to a developer-level technology rather than a user-level technology. (Did you know the file system on iPhonesis case sensitive?)

But so while I think The Tablet’s OS will be like the iPhone OS, I don’t think it will be the iPhone OS. Carved from the same OS X core, yes, but with a new bespoke UI designed to be just right for The Tablet’s form factor, whatever that form factor will be.

One common prediction I disagree with is that The Tablet will simply be more or less an iPod Touch with a much bigger display. But in the same way that it made no sense for Apple to design the iPhone OS to run Mac software, it makes little sense for a device with a 7-inch (let alone larger) display to run software designed for a 3.5-inch display.

The iPhone OS user interface was not designed in the abstract. It’s entirely about real-world usability, and very much designed specifically around the physical size of the device itself. The size and spacing of tappable targets are designed with the size of human thumb- and fingertips in mind. More importantly, the whole thing is designed so that it can be used one-handed. Even an adult with relatively small hands can go from one corner to the other with their thumb, holding the iPhone in one hand.

Mac OS X apps couldn’t run on an iPhone display because they simply wouldn’t fit, and the parts that did fit would contain buttons and other UI elements that were far too small to be used. Running iPhone software on a much larger display presents the opposite problem: it’s not that the UI couldn’t be scaled to fill the screen, it’s that it would be a waste to do so.

A 7-inch display isn’t twice the size of an iPhone’s, it’s fourtimes bigger in surface area. I’m not sure even Shaquille O’Neal could hold a 7-inch iPod Touch in one hand and swipe from corner to corner with his thumb. Why would Apple stretch a UI designed to afford for one-handed use on 3.5-inch displays to cover a 7-inch (or larger) display that couldn’t possibly be used one-handed? If Apple’s starting with a hardware size where the iPhone OS can’t be used one-handed, then trust me, they’re designing a new interaction model.

Apple is not in the business of making monolithic OSes that they cram down your throat on as many widely-varying devices as possible. Apple is in the business of making complete products, for which they craft derivative OSes to fit each product. There is a shared core OS. There is not a shared core UI.2

If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or just anything, I say you’re thinking too small — the equivalent of thinking that the iPhone was going to be just a click wheel iPod that made phone calls. I think The Tablet is nothing short of Apple’s reconception of personal computing.

Pete Cashmore from Mashable explains that Apple expects to sell 10 million tablets in the first year.

Apple expects to sell 10 million tablet computers in the product’s first year, according to a former Google executive.

Lee Kai-fu, founding president of Google China until September 2009, says in a blog post he heard the numbers from a friend.

He added that the Apple tablet (rumors now call it the iSlate or iGuide) will be launched this month at a sub-$1000 price point. He says the device’s 10.1-ich screen makes it resemble a large iPhone.

Lee’s Innovation Worksfund is an investor in iPhone-manufacturer Foxconn, although he denies that the information came from Foxconn or Apple.

Will you buy an Apple Tablet? Let us know in the comments.

[via Bloomberg]

The BBC have also reported that Apple shares have risen on speculation about the new platform and that Apple has booked the Yerba Buena Centre in San Francisco for 26 January (where the iPhone was launched).

Subject to copyright, can you imagine being able to read Andre Agassi’s autobiography Open that has key matches mentioned in the text embedded into the book? (Such as the 1990 French Open Final where he lost because he was so concerned his wig was about to fall off??)
How about reading Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk where he talks about a film clip where he dances like a robot (and the next day children around the world were imitating him).

Not being aware of that song and clip makes the text a little meaningless, but being able to see the clip makes the text so much more meaningful.

What does this mean for libraries, schools and school libraries? Is it the much heralded death-knell for books? Perhaps people will actually read more books when access is easier. However, access to eBooks means that the reader needs some type of machine to read them. Does this mean that access will actually be more difficult for many people due to cost? Will libraries, schools and school libraries provide these eReaders for patrons and students to help bridge the divide? Who would receive the machines? How would that be decided? Will libraries provide access to eBooks via their websites, much like the Overdrive system used by Yarra Plenty Regional Library and Brisbane Libraries that provides online access to mp3 audio books and eBooks? To overcome copyright issues, the mp3s that are downloaded by users are only available on the user’s machine for the normal loan period (say, three weeks) and then it becomes available for another user. Can you see libraries providing this service? What would the ramifications be for those of us in schools? Would the library become purely a service and a state of mind rather than an actual place? If so, what then happens to the community services that libraries provide?

There is certainly much to ponder here for publishers, booksellers and library staff. I would love any comments and thoughts. One thing is certain, more will become clearer once Apple make their announcement in a few weeks. At present, much of this is purely speculation. However, it seems to be an exciting and challenging time for those in the book industry.

Videos part of game plan for happy kids

Posted on December 11, 2009 by slav

This article appeared in yesterday’s Herald Sun. More and more academics are doing research in relation to the benefits of video games and the relationship between video games and learning.

By Greg Thom, From: Herald Sun, December 10, 2009 12:00AM

Helping: Academics say video games can be good for kids. Daniel, 8, and Ashley, 10. Children.Picture: Ian Currie Source: Herald Sun

PLAYING video games may help boost crucial social skills needed by pre-school children to help them succeed later in life.

Childhood development experts suggest fun games, which encourage teamwork and friendship, can lay the groundwork for positive interaction between children, leading to better behaviour and academic results.

They say parents’ obsession with ensuring children can read, write and count before reaching primary school can lead to a lack of emphasis on developing social skills.

Children who are socially successful at school are more likely to enjoy it, have a positive outlook on learning, display higher self-esteem and develop good coping skills.

Melbourne University childhood development expert Prof Michael Bernard said social competence had to be taught at home. He said many parents falsely thought children would reach primary school equipped to meet social needs.

“Some children come from home backgrounds where they never learn (playing naturally), and what’s important in the early years is to help up-skill them in social skills,” he said.

Children who did not know how to engage with others while playing would suffer later.

“If they don’t come to school with those skills, they’re at a very big disadvantage in terms of their emotional wellbeing,” he said.

Video games fostering social skills should be encouraged.

A recent paper prepared for the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority by early childhood researchers Patricia and Don Edgar said video games could help children develop skills such as comprehension, decision making, collaboration and leadership. But parental involvement was crucial.

Examples of helpful games include Wonder Pets: Save the Animals, about three friends who rescue animals, and games based on the pre-school hit Dora the Explorer.

Edublogs awards 2009

Posted on December 10, 2009 by slav

How exciting! Bright Ideas has been nominated and shortlisted for an Edublogs award in the category of best librarian/library blog. The next stage is voting: http://bit.ly/6KkyrU People can only vote once per IP address, so you might have to vote from home rather than work.

If you would like to pass on the link to anyone interested that would be nice. It would be an award for everyone who has contributed to Bright Ideas whether it be photos or information on their blogs, wikis, etc.

Thank you to the kind souls who nominated Bright Ideas!

Centre for Youth Literature

Posted on December 4, 2009 by slav

Keep an eye out for the information sent to Victorian schools from the Centre for Youth Literature. It should be winging its way to you late next week. Program Manager Mike Shuttleworth sends the following information:

The Centre for Youth Literature has produced a poster that will go to all Victorian schools. It will be mailed next Thursday and Friday.

All Victorian schools will receive a copy. It will be mailed to the Head of Library at all secondary school and Curriculum Coordinator at primary schools.

The printed poster A2 size, full colour and come folded. It will be mailed in the same envelope as the Library’s Semester One program. That includes the events, activities and programs of CYL and Education at the State Library of Victoria.

2010_CYL_poster

Always interesting to see what’s planned for the year. Thanks Mike.

The Wheeler Centre: Books, Writing, Ideas

Posted on December 1, 2009 by slav

Two recent articles published in The Age highlighted Melbourne’s forthcoming Wheeler Centre: Books, Writing, Ideas.

Wheelers help turn new page at centre

JASON STEGER

November 27, 2009

WHEN Tony and Maureen Wheeler created their travel-book company at a kitchen table in 1972, they had no idea Lonely Planet would become one of the great Australian entrepreneurial success stories.

They certainly couldn’t have known that hundreds of journeys later it would lead to the centrepiece of Melbourne’s successful bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature being named after them.

But yesterday there was a new title page in the story of the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas when it was renamed the Wheeler Centre: Books, Writing, Ideas.

The Wheelers, who sold 75 per cent of Lonely Planet to BBC Worldwide two years ago for about $200 million, have also made a substantial endowment to the centre, the income from which will be used to help fund the program of events when the centre opens next year.

The Wheelers have a philanthropic foundation, Planet Wheeler, that operates in the areas of child and maternal welfare, education and health care in South-East Asia and Africa.

Maureen Wheeler said when the idea of contributing to the centre was raised they decided it was a great way to give something back to Melbourne. ”We liked the idea immediately because it fitted in so much with the things we’re interested in. There isn’t anything like it in Australia and I love the fact that it’s in Melbourne.”

The Wheelers would not say how much their endowment was worth.

”When I compare it with what we started with, it’s a lot of money,” Mr Wheeler said. And Mrs Wheeler said, ”it was more than adequate”.

Centre director Chrissy Sharp said the substantial amount was a fantastic boon that eased the planning of events.

The centre also announced that its launch event would be held on February 13 – the anniversary of the Federal Government’s apology to the stolen generations – and would feature 12 writers telling stories that had been handed down to them through their families.

Among those taking part are David Malouf, Paul Kelly, Chloe Hooper, Alexis Wright, Christos Tsiolkas and Alex Miller. Ms Sharp said the centre’s full program would be unveiled in January.

The centre is based in a wing of the State Library of Victoria and, in addition to staging events, will provide a home for organisations such as the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Victorian Writers’ Centre and the Australian Poetry Centre.

Feisty, fabulous and full of ideas

Andrew Stephens
November 28, 2009

WHEN she was in her 20s, Chrissy Sharp strode into the Sydney offices of the then revered ABC documentary program Chequerboard and told them she wanted to work there. She had big ideas. ”I said, ‘I know I could work here: please give me a job.’ ” Sharp, who grew up in Canberra, had seen the indigenous tent embassy at Parliament House and she was in a lather to do something on it. Chequerboard, which tackled such thorny issues, took a risk and hired her as a researcher.

It was a lucky break – but then, she had been pushing for a while.

”There I was,” she says, ”at uni in Canberra, and I felt so guilty that I could be so aware of American civil rights but had never really, really, understood the plight of Aborigines. I thought, I’ve got to do something. I beleaguered Four Corners; but I was never a journalist, I wasn’t going to get a job on Four Corners – I used to get these responses saying, ‘Please apply to the typing pool.’ ” She pauses. ”And I couldn’t type.” So she went to Sydney for the old foot-in-door at Chequerboard.

These days, they come to her.

Here in her office in a wing of the State Library of Victoria – which houses the much-anticipated Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing, Ideas, where Sharp is inaugural director – she whips open a window to let the noise in. Clearly, she loves buzz and the flurry of creativity and – yes – the inevitable panic that her big new job attracts. So, windows open, that same sort of frenetic activity – the burble of trams, pedestrians and lunchtime conversations on the lawns below – filters up into her room. She thrives on it.

Chrissy Sharp, her husband, Michael Lynch, explains, is a truly formidable person. ”Woe betide anyone who gets in her way!” he laughs, uproariously. Not because she’s scary but because she’s full of warm, infectious energy; she gets things moving and she inspires loyalty. She’s immediately, immensely likeable. And very clever.

These two people have been described, rather lamely, as a ”power couple”, but there’s much more complexity and panache to it than that. You get the feeling – both of them have fantastic laughs, full of character – that they have enormous fun together when they meet up between the demanding tasks of their busy professional lives. There is, it seems, an authenticity of enjoyment about what they do and why they do it.

Last June, they arrived in Melbourne after about seven years in London, where Lynch was horrendously busy as chief executive of London arts hub the Southbank Centre; he had become one of England’s most admired and sparky arts administrators, overseeing the $260 million refurbishment of Royal Festival Hall. Sharp, who had previously been general manager of the Sydney Festival, had – of course – taken on a risky business there herself: trying to wrench ailing dance theatre Sadler’s Wells out of deep doldrums. She did more than that. By the time she left, it was the city’s pre-eminent dance outfit, with five successive surpluses and a quarter more attendees.

So it is hard to believe it when she reveals that, once upon a time, she ran a flower shop.

”It was such a long time ago, when I was a farmer’s wife,” she laughs. She had two sons in that marriage (she now has a stepdaughter, too), and a desire to open a flower shop in the NSW town near where they lived. ”It was very hard work. It meant twice a week driving down to the flower markets in Sydney and getting back by the time the shop opened. It was a lousy way to make money – but I was young. And very energetic.”

What’s changed? Now she is in full, energetic swing as director of the Wheeler Centre, her first job doing a start-up, from the ground up, with a small staff and – despite the Books and Writing bit in the centre’s title – a particularly deep interest in Ideas. Among the first people on her year-round program of events – it will be a festival that never stops – are ethicist/philosopher Peter Singer, US foreign affairs journalist Mark Danner and a top-notch panel teasing out the minefield of media ethics, led by former Ageeditor Michael Gawenda.

”The importance of cultural nourishment, whether it be through books or dance or music, is just vital, I think, to society, ” says Sharp, who has never lived in Melbourne but is agog at the depth of intellectual life she has discovered in just a few months. She wants the centre – named after Lonely Planet founders and philanthropists Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who have made a generous endowment – to be the sort of place where writers and thinkers talk about ideas, not just their own books. As Maureen Wheeler told one interviewer at this week’s announcement of the centre’s name, there were tough questions to ask before investing. But the Wheelers were very impressed with Sharp and with the concrete ideas behind it – it wasn’t, said Wheeler, the sort of ”arty” thing that says, ”Ideas, what are ideas?”

Indeed, Sharp is very pragmatic on this, noting that the recent economic downturn has provoked a lot of thinking about fundamental ethics and directions, a questioning of assumptions about endless growth and wealth. ”People from everywhere in society are interested in ideas,” she says. ”We want to take it into the town square, if you like, and bring some of our own fantastic thinkers who are in campuses around Melbourne or Australia, into a different kind of forum: where their ideas are accessible, where people get a familiarity, with not expecting it to be too high-brow, too rarefied or too boring. It’s got to be entertaining.”

The centre, housing the Melbourne Writers Festival, Victorian Writers Centre, Australian Poetry Centre and other literary organisations, was established after Melbourne won its bid for UNESCO City of Literature. It has a large performance space and workshop areas, where Sharp is planning forums that will spark debate.

”It seems I have yet to meet a person in Melbourne, especially women, who don’t belong to a book club,” she says. ”It – this city – seems to just absorb the idea of writing and the importance of books. It’s kind of a given, it seems to me. Everyone – my hairdresser! The guy who was painting the door the other day: I was sitting here talking to the chairman … and I mentioned [Orhan] Pamuk. [Later] the painter said, ‘I’m sorry, but I heard you talk about Pamuk.’ I asked him if he was Turkish; no, it was just that he and his wife lovePamuk. I love that! I was so impressed.”

She’s finding this all through Melbourne. ”It’s not just the job I’m doing: people do talk about the books they’re reading, or the ideas that they’d like to hear – they’re incredibly well informed. It is sucha writer’s place. Going out for lunch, there’s always some sort of fervent discussion about something to do with writing or books – it is a very intellectual city. Michael and I used to laugh about the fact that you’d come down from Sydney and you’d sit down to lunch and there’d be some intense” – she almost yells the word – ”argument going on. That is very Melbourne.”

There were some sour musings when Sharp’s appointment was announced last February: she, after all, is an outsider whose connection with the place had not extended much beyond holidays to aunts and grandparents here when she was a girl. Equally, though, she hadn’t set foot in Sydney until she was 16. But outsiders – she faced the same pursed lips when she took on Sadler’s Wells in London – often have the clearest view of what’s going on in a place and the sort of unsentimental temerity to get things done. She proved that at Sadler’s Wells as general manager alongside artistic director Alistair Spalding, and she looks like doing so here with her winning combination of financial and staff management, plus artistic, creative flair.

Lynch is droll about her dynamism. ”Much too much energy for my liking,” he says. ”I think she approaches life very full-on – they are lucky to have someone with the attention to detail and the energy that she brings to it. That’s going to stand the organisation in quite good stead. And she does command hugely loyal groups of people working with her. I’m not sure I would have quite had the energy at my flagging point in life to do it, but she seems to have driven herself day and night to make sure they could realise the potential of the idea.”

Lynch says he and Sharp worked amazingly hard in London. ”I dragged her to England to back me up, but she didn’t want to play dutiful wife entirely, so she took on Sadler’s Wells. I thought it was my turn to be a little more supportive and a little less demanding, with her being in this new role. Being in a new town, she has sent me out to find the house and do those sorts of things.”

While she has never worked with her husband, who has joined the ABC board, the two, he says, had one notoriously amusing conflict of interests some years ago when she was representing actors in the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance and he was running the Sydney Theatre Company.

”This was sort of indicative of her hide,” he confides, laughing. ”The actors’ union were taking industrial action against all of the major theatre companies, so she led a picket line outside one of our opening nights in Sydney. I was standing inside and she blandished kisses at me and said, ‘Come out and talk to me!’ I had to say, ‘No darling, I never cross picket lines. Even for my dear wife.’ She’s always been a feisty woman in that respect.”

SHARP grew up in a family where books were at the centre of things and she says that anyone who knows her isn’t surprised she has ended up heading a centre concerned with writing and ideas.

”My intellectual life for most of my childhood was books and music, inevitably,” she says. Her father, Ted Hannan, was a highly acclaimed professor of statistics at ANU, a man described by one biographer as ”outspoken, frequently irreverent” but ”transparently honest”.

”And my mother just loved music. My father’s interests, apart from mathematics, were very much history, biography and poetry, and it was my mother who introduced me to the whole canon of 20th-century American writers, in particular, and of Australian writers. It was very much a household that talked about books all the time. Then I went to university, started doing literature and history and ended up doing honours in history with Manning Clark, who’s very much a literary person. So books and literature and history were my forming influences.”

But she says that while it was her dream at university to become a writer, she has since found she is ” the one person who doesn’t have a novel in me.

”I realised in my early 30s, no I don’t think I have a novel to give the world, not of any great interest or importance. I am lucky having realised that at a reasonably early age – to have [since] been in positions where I can enable arts has been incredibly satisfying. I have been around enough to know that the people who do the hard work are the creators. They’re the ones that I hold on a pedestal.”

Lynch, it seems, might hold her there, though. ”Formidably smart,” he says. ”She scared me for many years on that front. She’s always been the one who’s read the books and had the brain and she’s always been a formidable person to argue, discuss or engage with. And I think she’s really thrilled [with her job]: books have always been a passion but she’s always been very good on ideas.” And at putting them into action.

A very exciting time for those of us passionate about books, writing and ideas.

Ian Thorpe’s efforts to improve indigenous literacy

Posted on November 28, 2009 by slav

Lovely article about Ian Thorpe’s endeavours to improve indigenous literacy in yesterday’s Herald Sun:

A TINY six-seater plane lands on a dusty runway, somewhere east of Katherine in the Northern Territory.

Out leaps swimming superstar Ian Thorpe with a precious cargo – hundreds of books. Every child will go home with a selection of titles including Where The Wild Things Are and Dr Seuss.

“For some of these kids it is the first book that they have seen,” Thorpe said.

The literacy backpack is one of his favourite programs carried out by the Fountain for Youth Foundation – the charity he set up as an 18 year old.

The foundation focuses almost exclusively on closing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. Thorpe was shocked by what he saw when he walked into his first remote community six years ago. “Australia has some of the worst poverty in the world. That was the catalyst for my involvement,” he said.

A wonderful program by Ian Thorpe’s Fountain for Youth Foundation.

Australian Children’s Literature Alliance

Posted on November 24, 2009 by slav

The Australian Children’s Literature Alliance is a relatively new organisation that aims to promote all things reading.

From their website comes the following information:

The Australian Children’s Literature Alliance is an independent, not-for-profit organisation founded in 2008 to champion and promote the transformational power of reading in the lives of young Australians. ACLA is a collegial and inclusive organisation with representation from all children’s and young adult literature industry and community sectors.

ACLA’s mission is to:

promote the value, importance and transformational nature of reading

influence the reading habits of Australian families

raise the profile of books in the lives of children and young adults

champion the cause of young Australians’ reading in a consultative, collegial and inclusive way.

ACLA is currently in the process of establishing a Children’s Laureate for Australia. Read more about the Children’s Laureate project here.

The current ACLA Board members are:

Bronwen Bennett (VIC) Chair

Malcolm Neil (VIC) CEO, Australian Booksellers Association

Paula Kelly (VIC) State Library of Victoria, representing the Centre for Youth Literature

Damian Morgan (TAS) Independent Bookseller, Stories Bookshop Launceston

Dyan Blacklock (SA) Convenor, Children’s Publishing Committee, Australian Publishers’ Association

Libby O’Donnell (NSW) Australian Publishers’ Association

Fiona Lange (SA) The Little Big Book Club

Ann James (VIC) Australian Society of Authors

Marj Kirkland (QLD) National President, Children’s Book Council of Australia

Val Noake (NSW) e:lit – the Primary English Teaching Association

Lesley Reece (WA) Director, Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre

ACLA and its projects are managed by Tina Lehnert, Project Officer.

A wonderful development and a useful resource for anyone interested in the power and value of reading.

Wizarding World of Harry Potter

Posted on November 18, 2009 by slav

Harry Potter fans rejoice; the theme park at Universal Studios is not far away now. With an opening date of Spring (US) 2010, Universal has released a video and information about the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

This video of park creators should interest adults and children alike.

Love what they’ve done with the Marauder’s Map! Can’t wait to visit. More videos available at here.

Lost in cyberspace

Posted on November 18, 2009 by slav

This lengthy but thought provoking article appeared in The Sunday Age on Sunday 15 November. It asks the question that if “possessions define us… what does it say about our identity when iPods replace CD racks and Kindles take the place of bookshelves?”

How many of us have perused the CD collections and bookshelves of friends and lovers to help us form our opinions of them?

PETER MUNRO

November 15, 2009

A YEAR or so ago, Professor Bob Cummins, convener of the Australian Centre on Quality of Life, emptied his shelves of books and left them on a table where staff and students at Deakin University give away unwanted stuff, like promotional CDs and old pieces of fruit.

It was liberating, he says. Utterly practical, too, given almost every piece of information he will ever need is available in compact electronic form. But he glances at his bare wooden shelves now and pauses. ”I feel like I have lost a social marker,” he says, finally. ”The fact is that I just never read those books and was never going to read them again – they were just academic props. But maybe they filled a function as that – as a prop for who Cummins is … probably shouldn’t have done it.”

Entering his office, you search for clues to reveal his likes and dislikes, fascinations and expertise. ”I guess walking into an academic’s office and finding a wall of earnest books is quite consoling; it means at face value you look like the real deal. Someone sitting in their office with bare shelves – how odd, what’s wrong with them?”

Perhaps a giant wall poster of Albert Einstein might suffice, he says, laughing. Anything to fill the void left as visual markers disappear behind blank computer screens.

Possessions help define us, brand us, but what happens when they start to hide away in boxes in top cupboards – CD stacks supplanted by iPod docks, film collections by downloads, libraries by wireless reading devices. Perhaps it’s part of a broader disconnect from society. As the world grows more intrusive, we retreat.

An article in Vanity Fairin August called this trend ”The Vanishing”. In mock-horror tones, the glossy mag moaned how homogenous e-books and iPods had stopped culture snobs showing off their superior tastes in literature and music to the masses. Equally, it was becoming impossible to spy on other people’s tastes and make judgments about them.

Sitting on a New York subway, writer James Wolcott watched a woman hold up a Kindle – Amazon’s wireless electronic reader, which became available to Australian readers this month – at an angle to catch the light. ”Unless you were an elf camped on her shoulder, what she was reading was hoarded from view, an anonymous block of pixels on a screen, making it impossible to identify its content and to surmise the state of her inner being, erotic proclivities, and intellectual calibre.”

Books ”help brand our identities”, he wrote. So what might become of us as such branding vanishes? Book jacket design might become a lost art, like album-cover art. The average coffee table book may not survive. Selected titles might be showcased in wall-mounted frames, with a small, built-in ledge, like a stage. Imagine every home displaying Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father above otherwise clean, white bookshelves.

Beyond books, technology means we have to squint or turn our heads sharply, to read the small print on the sides of DVD cases. Music is now ”residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls”, as speaker docks have replaced CD collections. Some bloggers have resorted to posting shuffle lists of their iPods online to advertise their eclectic tastes. Parties are reportedly held at which young hosts now hook up digital frames to their iPods, simply so guests can watch album cover images for whatever tunes are playing.

One particular passage in Vanity Fair, quoted in turn from The New York Times, resonated: ”After two decades of defining ourselves in terms of our possessions, we now need to figure out who we would be without them.”

Two years ago, I packed my meagre music library of about 200 CDs inside a cardboard box, inside a bedroom cupboard I need a chair to reach. The heavy wooden CD tower vanished from the front yard in the next hard waste collection. In its place, sitting in a speaker dock in my living room, is an anonymous iPod that can store about 20,000 songs – each of them nicely arranged by artist/album/genre.

It’s neat and clean and compact, if not a little lonely sitting there atop the bookshelf. I wonder if my small library of books might one day disappear the same way, subsumed by a single digital device that I can take on holidays and read on the beach without the breeze ruffling the electronic pages. But what to do with all those bare shelves?

Futurist Mark Pesce packed about 2000 books in a storage unit in California six years ago before moving to Australia. He visited them last year in an attempt to winnow away about half the titles – but it’s hard graft. ”In a way that no other possession I own is me, they’re me, they’re absolutely me,” he says.

And yet, he reckons weighty textbooks, which are expensive to print for a niche market, may one day be sucked holus-bolus into digital reading devices. Reading for pleasure, whether handsome literary classics or those airport books hidden at the back of the bookshelf, will be the last thing to go. ”The thing that has scared me the most is, as an intellectual, I always like going into someone else’s house who is an intellectual to see what books they have. I find it extremely satisfying and exciting to look through someone else’s library,” he says.

”But I strongly suspect they will reappear in some other form. Already, some web-based services, such as Safari, are like a library where you can indicate what books you read. They’re like a web-based bookshelf, so before you go to see somebody, you drop by their electronic bookshelf and see what they’re reading.”

A Twitterer he follows recently declared how much he enjoyed listening to the rather earnest West London folk band Mumford and Sons. Once, Pesce might have had to rifle through a CD collection to make such a discovery. Now, many people are more inclined to reveal themselves through digital pointers rather than actual physical objects.

It’s different, sure, but who says it’s better? There are some obvious pitfalls to relying largely on the self-selections of others. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. But nor do they know you’re lying when you pretend to have read Proust. A university peer once claimed he had finished Ulyssesand thought it ”not a bad read”. I wanted to punch him in the jaw. Now, he can list his most memorable titles on booktagger.com.au, and annoy so many more people all at once.

Pesce says there is so much clutter online that something has to give. ”I read a Tech Lunch piece by a music reviewer who realised his 14-year-old son had been exposed to more music by that age than this older man had been in his entire life,” he says.

”This 14-year-old had never lived in an age where media has never been instantly available at the click of a button. Now we have an age of such hyper-abundance of media that, in fact, there is no place we can put it all. So much is coming from everywhere that things need to vanish.”

Here’s a neat game: next time you see someone wearing headphones on the train or walking down the street, stop them and ask what they’re listening to. You may need to nudge them to get their attention.

I tap Shane Cameron, 36, project manager for a smallgoods company, on the shoulder as he stands on crutches at Southern Cross Station, waiting for a train to North Melbourne. He’s been forced to catch the train since knee surgery – the downside to years of indoor soccer and taekwondo – and passes the time listening to Texan alternative rockers Sparta on a white iPod. ”It relieves the boredom,” he says. ”I always have something to keep myself occupied.”

On a separate train to Flinders Street Station, Gerard Richardson, 20, is listening to Canadian singer-songwriter Feist, while reading The Making of Julia Gillard. Small-business owner Anna Parente, 62, alights at South Yarra Station with a portable radio tuned to 3AW. ”I’ve had three train cancellations this morning. I’m furious. This takes my mind off things,” she says.

Massage student Jess Keighran, 21, is travelling to Richmond from Essendon, and leaves one earphone in while we speak. ”I usually read and listen at the same time, so you don’t have to listen to other people’s boring conversations. I just zone out, forget about what’s around me,” she says. What are you listening to now? ”I’m listening to nothing, the music just stopped.”

We plug in and plug out, often as soon as we walk beyond our front door. The headphones go on, we tap away at text messages or hunch over mobile phone screens on the train, playing solo computer games or watching the latest episode of our favourite TV shows. It’s another form of vanishing, really. Another way we disappear behind mobile technology, disconnecting from the inane bluster and bustle about us. Morning peak hour is like being stuck inside a mobile phone dead zone, with only the tinny bleed of noise from your neighbour’s overloud MP3 as company. It doesn’t matter that no one’s talking to each other, because no one’s listening any more.

Well, almost no one. Sound designer David Franzke spent 18 months riding Melbourne trains to record conversations for use in Anna Tregloan’s play, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, which premiered at last month’s Melbourne International Arts Festival. The sound of silence made his work frustrating, he says now, as we trundle along on a city-bound train from North Melbourne at 9am.

We are close enough to touch our fellow passengers, their hands busy checking text messages or sending emails, their ears piped with blather. I’m conscious Franzke, scruffy and curious amid so many suits, is the only one talking. ”I don’t think a lot of people get to do what they want to do with their lives. They end up taking a gig where they have to pull on a suit and go to work every day, and I don’t think it’s very much fun and I think they do shut down,” he says.

”You don’t hear as much now as you once did. You watch a group of kids who are travelling to school together and, let’s say there’s seven of them, at least three are going to have earbuds in their ears. They hit each other to get their attention.

”You see a lot of girls split their earphones to have one each, so they actually are in each other’s worlds for a little while. But it’s devolution not evolution. We’re actually losing the ability to communicate.”

Deakin University’s Bob Cummins – he of the empty bookshelves – says such disconnection is symptomatic of an age when people increasingly live alone. Paradoxically, at a time when it is possible to touch more people than ever before online, we position ourselves as islands from each other. ”People are retreating into themselves even further and taking themselves away from the bothersome interaction of other people,” he says.

”You can only do it in the anonymity of a large city. But people might want to do it because they are so overloaded with other information, or overloaded from too much social contact from Facebook – I mean, how much can you deal with?”

But Jenny Lewis, author of new book Connecting and Co-operating, instead sees Facebook and Twitter as opening opportunities for new, far-flung social interactions. ”To say we don’t know everybody who lives in our street and we don’t all go out for dinner, doesn’t say we have no friends. We have changed away from very local versions of connectedness to these other, maybe even virtual, communities,” she says.

We still use social markers to reveal our preferences and dislikes to others, but in less tangible ways, she argues. ”I see people comparing libraries on iPods and iPhone apps. It is not so easily accessible to look at things on bookshelves but I think people still swap and share their connections, just in different ways.

”Some people use their iPod defensively, to block out inane talk, but you wonder whether it is very different from how it used to be. It is not as if people used to strike up conversations that often before. We’re just so busy and time poor that we often feel too stressed and don’t feel we have time to do those basic things. So the moments we do get, we want just to ourselves.”

One train conversation detailed in The Dictionary of Imaginary Placesinvolves a girl who says she wants to quit Facebook because she feels too exposed. ”I don’t want to be found, that’s why I moved away,” she says. ”I actually hate it when I go in there cause there is 1001 messages going, ‘So and so has requested a friendship. So and so has changed their mood.’ Some people I might have gone to high school with; I might have sat next to on the train and I wouldn’t know.”

Her words ring in my ears as I stand on a quiet train, stuck in the interminable circle of hell that is the City Loop, and notice a man in the carriage reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

An older man in a dark blue suit sits with his white earphones in and his eyes closed, a beatific smile on his dial. And I wish I were in his world, if only to the next station.

I recently culled the vast majority of my CD collection as I was sick of dusting them and I never listened to them outside of the iPod. Books will prove different for many teacher librarians I believe, me included.

Happy ISLD!

Posted on October 26, 2009 by slav

Thank you to the International Association of School Librarianship for ways to celebrate International School Library Day.

ISLDlogo-large

Suggested Activities for International

School Library Day

For School Libraries and Other Organisations

I	If your school library has a Web site, create a special page to publicise International School Library Day. Include the work of students. Tell the IASL Webmaster so we can link to your page.
N	News… Send a press release to your local newspaper with information about International School Library Day activities. A sample press release is available on this Web site.
T	Tell people in your school community about International School Library Day and the importance of school libraries in teaching and learning.
E	Encourage reading. Have your students compile a list of five books from your country (no more than five — this will force them to discuss their choices) that they think school students in other countries should read. Send the list to IASL-LINK, with information about the age level of the students who compiled the list.
R	Recognise excellence. Use International School Library Day as an opportunity to recognise the contribution of other people to the school library programme — student monitors/aides, support staff, teachers, parents, staff of the local education/library authority, volunteers, donors.
N	Notify the IASL Newsletter Editor and/or the IASL Webmaster about your activities and share your ideas with others. Send a message about what you are doing to IASL-LINK…
A	Arrange a book fair with an international theme. This might include highlighting books about other countries, books by authors from other countries, books in other languages…
T	Take part in one of the special activities organised by IASL to celebrate International School Library Day this year. There is information on this Web site to help you.
I	IASL-LINK… Use the IASL listserv, IASL-LINK, to tell other members of the Association what you are doing for International School Library Day. Share ideas for activities…
O	Organise a visiting speaker from an international organisation, or a speaker who has worked in another country, or someone who has been involved in an international project.
N	Newsletter. If your school (or your school library) has a newsletter, write a short article about International School Library Day and the importance of the school library in education. Ask students to write about their school library and publish the best articles.
A	Americans call them mousepads; Australians and Europeans call them mousemats. Ask your students to design one that will remind the user of school libraries every time she/he uses a mouse! A Christmas present for the school principal, perhaps?
L	Link up with the local public library for a cooperative activity. Ask the local public library to host a display about the school library; support the local public library by hosting a display for them in Library Week or at another time.

S	SLAV (the School Library Association of Victoria) is producing some promotional materials for International School Library Day. Check out their Web site and consider placing an order.
C	Contact a school library in another country to exchange messages or undertake a co-operative activity, perhaps using email or the Web. If you are an IASL member, use IASL-LINK to make contact…
H	Help a school library in a developing country by raising money to enable them to buy books and other materials that they need. Contact IASL to contribute to the IASL Books for Children Project.
O	Organise an Open Day in your school library and invite parents and other members of the local community. Have students demonstrate the online catalogue, computer-based services… or show new books or other resources.
O	Organise (or attend) a function through your local school library association or library association to celebrate International School Library Day — a seminar, a party…
L	Logo. Ask your students to design a logo for International School Library Day, such as might be used on a Web page. Send the best to the IASL Webmaster (electronically if possible) for mounting on the IASL Web site, with the name of the student and the school.

L	Library monitors/aides. Organise a visit to another school library (or another library) for your student library monitors, so that they can meet other people who are interested in libraries, and see how another library functions. Make them feel important, show them that the school values their contribution.
I	Interview (with your students) parents and others in the school community to find out what school libraries were like when they were at school. Share stories about the changes in school libraries over the years. Display the interview transcripts and any photos that are available.
B	Bookmarks (the paper or cardboard ones!). Ask students to design bookmarks promoting their school library and/or International School Library Day, for the principal, teachers, their parents.
R	Reach out. Invite a local politician, or journalist, to spend half a day in the school library. Talk to them about school libraries; let them see a school library “at work”; have your students show them what they have achieved through the school library; show them the resources; talk about needs. Be positive — emphasise the importance of school libraries for learning.
A	An activity organised in conjunction with the library staff of a local university or college, for senior secondary school students who will be going on to higher education.
R	Run a School Library Trivia Afternoon (or evening, depending on the audience), with questions being related to the school library or capable of being answered through its resources. One group might compile the Trivia Quiz questions in advance for another group to answer. You could share your questions (and answers!) with others through IASL-LINK or the IASL Web site.
Y	Yahoo! With your students, search the Internet for information about school libraries in other countries. Use the results as the basis for a discussion of the ways in which school libraries differ around the world.

D	Displays with an International School Library Day theme, not just in the school library but in the school entrance area, or at an outside location. Involve the students…
A	Associations and organisations of school librarians and school library media people. Support your local association; take part in its activities; contribute to its newsletter or magazine; attend conferences and seminars. Ask the association to support International School Library Day.
Y	Yay! Let’s party! Join together with other local school librarians, librarians, and people who support school libraries, to celebrate International School Library Day! Invite your school principal. Invite school district or library authority personnel. Present them with reminders of school libraries (mousemats/mousepads, bookmarks, balloons, badges). See above for ideas.

School Library Association of Victoria

Category Archives: News