Futurelab have a blog: it’s called Flux, and it’ll be launching in the New Year, once we’ve had a play with it. There’s a panel of contributors, including people from outside Futurelab, so hopefully it’ll present a range of voices, all dealing with various issues around learning and technology.

It’ll be interesting to see how it feels when you’re one voice among many. For one thing, I have to think about what goes either side of my posts now. My first contribution, an intemperate and overlong rant about “digital natives”, comes just after Martin’s restrained condemnation of the decision to scale back Ultralab, and the two together do a good job of making us look a bit miserable. Will try and find some more positive things to put up there. And make my posts shorter.

I’m on the fifth floor of the National Library in Singapore, in a room with Ian Livingstone, Caryl Shaw, John Buchanan and a whole bunch of interesting researchers and developers, taking a break from an intensive day of thinking about a whole load of different projects – mobile games, games to help teach film language, a campus-wide ARG making use of ad-hoc bluetooth networks and a whole load of other projects. I took a break from that last sentence to talk to someone from animationxpress.com and read about the New Games Movement before going for karaoke and then coming back for a second day of talks ad conversations, including a chat with Caryl from EA about Spore, a new game she’s working on, and an introduction to ACID.

I’d meant to write everything up here as soon as it happened, but to be honest, my brain’s full. It’s been overstimulating. Which is always better than boring.

Something that I’ve been mulling over in the back of my mind recently is the difference between the phrases “Information and Communication Technologies” and “Interactive and Digital Media”. They’re often used in by people who are working in similar areas (in the cases I see, trying to change the way people learn) and often to refer to similar species of technology: the fact they’re most commonly used in abbreviated form and rarely articulated helps people to use them to refer to a domain that I suspect is best described as “all that techy stuff, you know, games and things made by electronics companies, and phones, they’re amazing now, and there’s all this new kind of internet around as well, all that”.

But there’s a fundamental difference. “ICT” is concerned with the exchange of information, with communication, with activity that at root is something to with people and what makes them human. “IDM” describes the way information might be presented to someone. It describes the qualities of the thing being presented, not the reason for presenting it: the recipient or the producer of the information don’t seem to be part of what’s being described. I suppose some might claim that for something to be “interactive” there must be a person around to interact with it, and fair enough, but the word “interactive” describes potential while “communication” describes action: what bothers me about “IDM” is the passive nature of the description, that there doesn’t necessarily have to be a person involved with the media. “IDM” talks about the thing as an end in itself.

I suppose another aspect of this is the assumptions about the political and social structures behind using either phrase: at minimum, there seem to be assumptions about the kind of manufacturing capacity available in a particular society being made by people using either one. But it seems to me that “ICT” could describes bonfire beacons as well as VoIP, flag signalling between ships as well as Morse Code, knotted Aztec string and smoke signals and talking drums as well as anything that needs a cable to work. “IDM” seems to bring with it an idea that printed circuit boards and display monitors are easy to come by and produce.

This train of thought’s obviously come from Singapore Central, a station where “IDM” is used a lot and “ICT” seems very rare. Although I think it’s a useful thing, to remind yourself about the root of bits of jargon you use a lot, making this distinction between the phrases might be revealing some prejudice about an environment I’ve only just arrived in: I suppose if anyone disagrees, they can send me a picture of them sticking two fingers up at me, an interaction which is definitely digital.

Busy but productive first week, I think, managed to meet a lot of interesting people and I’m beginning to get a (very blurry) idea of how the various agencies and organisations with an interest in games and learning work with each other. What I hadn’t been prepared for, coming from the UK, was the level of acceptance that exists for the idea that games might be an appropriate media for learning: every time I’ve been braced for the usual “but aren’t games evil things that turn our children into killers?” it’s failed to take place. Which is a good thing. Interestingly, the issue of addiction has come up at every event I’ve been to (attended largely by teachers).

Most of my time has been spent in taxis, offices and shopping malls so so far. So it made a nice change to find the road outside the flat closed on Saturday for the Deepavali celebrations. Here’s three videos for a flavour of the night:

The video above was on Race Course Road, where the procession made its way before the stage on Farrer Fields fired up.

The banner on the drums said that this was the Dance Troupe of Sri Lanka. There’s only a little bit of video here, partly because there weren’t really any natural breaks in the performances and also partly because I felt like a tourist waving my camera around. If it had been my mobile (handphone) I would have fitted right in, but that would have been a waste of time as the camera’s no good for night-time.

This was closer to music I’d heard before, although I’ve never seen a crowd so up for it before: the video doesn’t really show the energy that was flying around the stage. Most of the jokes went over my head, though.

More photos in the strip above.

I went home thinking about authenticity. As a European relative of the colonials that originally established a racecourse here, watching people dance in pointy hats made me feel that I was at some kind of “cultural event”, one that only exists for the benefit of tourists like me. The event was sponsored by local government cultural agencies, which only reinforced this idea, reminding me of the kind of self-consciously inclusive London events that Ken Livingston sponsors. And yet the crowd weren’t tourists and were shouting in a way that suggested a proper connection with what was going on on stage: the dancing wasn’t polished, either. More than anything, it made me think of ceilidhs and barn dances in England: the performers and audience/participants are genuine members of the community whose art it is, but the art can only exist in a space generated especially for it: its connection with everyone’s daily life doesn’t exist without effort and the support of larger institutions. The sowing gestures of the women dancing aren’t ones I’ve seen anywhere else round here: hard to grow crops on tarmac.

You know how it goes, you spend months sitting on your backside in the same office, staring vaguely at a point just in front of your monitor, talking to the same three people about the same three things, and then all of sudden you end up renting a flat on the other side of the world and taking more taxes than an impecunious baron bent on pursuing an unprofitable military operation overseas.

I’m sorry, that should have said “taxis”. Anyway, since I rode in from Changi I’ve managed to find a flat to live in and met everyone I’m going to be working with. It’s been quite a good introduction to Singapore, as it happens, having a reason to drive from east (where the venue that hosted ICET is) to west (where affordable condos and LSL are) every day, although it would have been nice maybe to do it without having to man our stand at the same time.

The expo/conference was good, though. I met a whole bunch of people there: some exhibitors who are doing really interesting technological things (lagless video over IP! serious!) and attendees, who were remarkable to someone from the UK for being almost entirely teaching professionals, with hard questions about the value of what we do and how our partnership with IDA would benefit them. It was refeshing, after BETT, to be spending time talking with people who actually stand in front of students, rather than people who just buy the kit, or pay for it.

And of course it was an honour to meet Permanent Secretary for Education LG(NS) Lim Chuan Poh, even if only briefly, and even if it was only to answer some questions about Racing Academy. There was a lot more media attention on the event than I think people expected, and gratifyingly we caught an item on Channel News Asia’s ticker describing the partnership between “IDA and Britain’s Futurelab”, followed later by an interview with the CEO of IDA talking about what we’ll be doing over the next two years (in which he mentioned by name one of my objectives for the next six months, so no pressure). I missed the interview, unfortunately, because I was at the

Changi Village hotel, the venue for the official conference dinner, where I met the rest of my team from the IDA, who taught me as much Singlish as they thought I could handle. For once in my dissolute life I left early, despite the easy availability of booze, recognising that the relationship between me and my new climate is something we both need to work on before it can truly be called postive.

Obviously my talk on Friday was sparsely attended and lacking in questions, it being Friday evening on the last day of the conference, but the workshop on Wednesday was really interesting, to me at least if not the participants. Two things stood out: the emphasis of teachers present on issues around addiction to games and the ethics represented by games, and the consensual, equal and I suppose just plain adult nature of the group discussions. I was expecting some kind of UK-style ego fight, where a dominant figure needs to give the rest some space, or a member who’s too cool to take part needs to be encouraged to take part, but there was nothing. Refreshing.

Obviously, the rest of the week was taken up by me staring open-mouthed at everything and thinking “but…how can everything be exactly like England and yet confuse me utterly?”