Fitting the battle of life

Well, having posted a message for Obama in the flickr pool as I blogged the other day, I was rather excited to see the following message pop up in my inbox yesterday:

As you know Guardian News & Media (GNM) recently set up a group on Flickr called “A Message for Obama” to capture the many and diverse personal reactions to the election of President Obama. Thank you for taking part! We have been inspired and excited by both the quantity and quality of contributions so far – it’s an amazing collaborative effort.

To further commemorate this historic occasion, Guardian Books is publishing a book called “A message for Obama”, featuring some of the images uploaded to this Flickr group. The book will be 140 pages long, with a recommended retail price of up to GBP 9.99, and will be available in December 08.

This is a not-for-profit venture, as GNM will be donating all proceeds from this edition to the Guardian Katine project, details of which can be found at: www.guardian.co.uk/katine

We would very much like to include your photograph in this project.

www.flickr.com/photos/joshblacker/3008960552/

Of course, with 140 pages to fill, I’m not the only one. There’s a thread in the flickr group about it, but apart from that, no mention I can find on the web. Bobbie Johnson (a tech writer) seems to be the only staff member to have acknowledged publicly that this project is going on. The Guardian’s Deadline USA blog has the original announcement, but nothing of the new book project. [Edit: also found this blog post about it from another flickr member.]

You’d have thought that putting together a £9.99 book and hoping to make profits (for charity, basically) would require more of a marketing push. Are there really that many people who’ll buy it, when all the photos are online? Depending on the license applied, you could download them all and print your own book of your own favourites anyway – for as cheap as the printing costs you. Of course, that wouldn’t net the very worthy Katine project any extra funds.

Hmm. (This is me not knowing what to think.)

[Update: The book is now out and I have my copy!]

Just thought I’d hilight one of the Ubuntu Open Week sessions I attended yesterday, a very informative and useful talk from Tony Whitmore of the Ubuntu-UK Podcast on Media Production using Ubuntu. You can read the log here. It was a good overview of the apps you might need to produce video, photography and audio using open source – well worth a read if you have ten mins or any interest in multimedia.

This is a wonderful story about how the French press was so easily deluded by things that were said and done on Facebook, believing them to be true. Moral of the story: just because it’s in a book (or newspaper) doesn’t make it true.

I’m more than slightly excited by Yale’s recent announcement that it is opening up parts of its curriculum to whoever might stumble upon it online. At the moment there are 7 whole courses whose material is mostly licensed under a Creative Commons license, with course materials and videos of lectures available for download, ranging from the fundamentals of physics to a series of lectures on modern poetry (which I’m currently downloading!).

Obviously there is a difference between the education you’d receive from just reading the course materials and watching the lectures and actually going to Yale; for a start, you don’t get professors marking your own work on the subject, which is a vital part of the learning process. But it is an extraordinary step that the lectures themselves have been opened up. Good lecturers can present material better than a book can, for instance (and books have been freely available in libraries for a few years now). It opens up access to influential ideas and academics in a way a library can’t (and occasionally there’s the odd student crossing the screen having turned up late, for humour value), and gives great pointers to relevant reading material that you won’t be able to find elsewhere – just looking over the Philosophy shelves in a library doesn’t tell you which books, authors or topics are most important, for instance.

On another level, this step broadens the audience of higher education to those who just can’t go to Yale for whatever reason (e.g. distance), and introduces a new business model to higher education. Just like Canonical, for instance, the model is not to provide the end product (here, lectures, there, an OS) for a price, but support services that go along with that (in education, marking essays, answering questions). While there are of course differences (like, no one has to be encouraged to go to Yale, but Canonical have to market Ubuntu), the analogy stands to some extent.

p.s. Of course, to be truly open the videos shouldn’t be in .mov, rather in .ogg. But that’s a topic for another day ;)