Back to blogging
All these new services like twitter, delicious, flickr, facebook and youtube – not to mention the time we spent trying to get WeGlu off the ground – have taken the toll on our blogging output. Well i’m off to copenhagen tomorrow to talk about collaboration and challenges at the opening conference for the EU project Learning 2.0: Digital Literacies and Innovation at the National Gallery of Art. I’ll post my presentation when i get back.
Transforming education
Last year, my colleague Dan Medicoff launched our learning service called OOKL following a successful trial with the Department for Culture, Media and Sports. Its now being used in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Portsmouth and over 15,000 students have OOKLed at venues ranging from Kew Gardens to the National Maritime Museum supporting subjects varying from art and Botany to creative writing. Read about turtle man and rockosapian to see how children use OOKL in ways that we would never imagine.
We think that OOKL shows how creative thinking and technology can transform any business whether social, physical or environmental. In the past, students made notes with pen and pencil then went home and wrote essays for their teachers to mark. With OOKL, the paper becomes the physical world around you and the pen becomes a mobile recorder that can store and share words, images and sounds wherever you are. This doesn’t stop drawing or physical activity as children can make pictures or 3D models then record and discuss their work with OOKL too. And because OOKL is mobile it means that children can learn socially and in motion rather than learn while sitting at a computer screen.
OOKL doesn’t stop there. As with all digital things its now possible for students to copy and share each other’s notes and ideas rather than work in isolation. This opens students to the realisation that collaboration isn’t cheating but a process we all use to make our ideas better.
We’d love to meet people and organisations who want to improve their products and services through an exciting process of discovery, collaboration, design and creation.
Do get in touch.
Thinking about ecology and community
I was thinking today about the way in which the word ‘communities’ is being used to describe both physical and digital groups of people. I came across this article – Using Communities to Drive Performance and Innovation in Arup written by colleagues at my old company. They rightly show that online communities can only perform certain functions. They mention ‘powerful search’ and ‘threaded discussions’ but they do not believe that they can replace face to face or physical communities. Instead its all about balancing the costs and benefits of the physical and the digital.
I then looked at their home page and saw that Peter Head, their director of Planning and Integrated Urbanism is giving a lecture next week entitled, “Entering an Ecological Age”. “Human development is now following a dangerously unsustainable path globally,” he explains. “Waves of investment in low and middle income countries are accelerating this problem because they are following an unsustainable model. Our urban areas and methods of food production consume land and non-renewable resources inefficiently. But we can do something to turn the situation around: we can move towards an ecological age.”
At the SEA, we believe that an ecological approach is one of the key elements required to develop better (more creative, more engaging and more caring) products and services, whether they operate at a global or a local level.
We’d like to work with clients who have a similar belief or would like us to prove to them that this approach is worth following from an economic perspective as well as from a social and environmental one.
Please do get in touch.
What is the future of rich media on the mobile?
We are working with New England based start-up Peermeta to develop the user experience for the discovery, consumption and socialisation of video content on mobile devices.
The project has helped us to develop our understanding of the relationship between traditional content providers like the BBC and new forms of media expression and collaboration that you can find on social networks. One of the opportunities that Peermeta are helping to explore is how to break up large format video into interesting and fun chunks that can be watched and shared wherever you are.
WeGlu in mobile user experience competition
WeGlu is one of the entries in this year’s mobile experience competition. Check our entry out and vote for us!
It sounds like Graffiti
We’re working with Shabina Aslam, the art’s council and Rich Mix to develop a new place based radio series that you can listen to while visiting a real location. What happens when the voices of the community are transformed into short radio plays instead of visual grafitti? Find out later this year. Or get in touch if you’d like to see how we can help transform the way you interact with the world around you.
WeGlu becomes an alpha baby
After a year in development, we are proud to announce that WeGlu is moving in to alpha. I know, we don’t get many readers here but it’s nice to announce it anyway 
We are really proud of what we have developed and look forward to hearing from you, wherever you are.
Thanks from The SEA and the WeGlu team
Virtual Friends in a virtual world
I’ve just finished writing an essay for vodafone’s receiver magazine. The article won’t be up until october, but, in essence, it argues for a world where digital tools support the physical world we live in rather than provide an alternative environment to escape in to….
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WeGlu goes live with Skins Series 2 and Channel 4
Channel 4’s digital youth channel E4 has launched its award-winning youth drama ‘Skins’ into the mobile social network WeGlu. Fans of the show, currently enjoying a second successful series, can receive updates and exclusive content from the show during and between episodes. Viewers can download WeGlu to their mobile and find Skins in their address book alongside all their other friends. E4 can then send content from the series, including unseen footage and preview material, to create anticipation about the next episode.WeGlu is a social networking service designed for the 50 to 100 million young people worldwide that have modern mobile phones. It also provides any organisation, such as media companies, sporting clubs and music companies, with web 2.0 communication tools that engage this web- and mobile-savvy audience. “Being able to have a dialogue with their fans is key for these organisations”, says WeGlu Co-founder, Paul Phillips. “Getting into fans’ address books is permission-based, so they are telling you: ‘I’ll give you the right to communicate with me as long as your stuff is entertaining or useful.’”Cameron Saunders, Head of Marketing for Digital Channels at Channel 4, says “We have been very successful at extending Skins into social networks on the web. WeGlu gives us the ability to have richer conversations with Skins fans and to weave our content into their conversations, wherever they are”.