global digital creativity research & workshops

Today Neil Boughen and myself headed up the M11 to Cambridge to support the local Anglia Ruskin Summer School 2006 at Cambridge Campus. The one week ‘Introduction to University’ programme demonstrates to participants what University life can be like, and is aimed at those who’s parents have not been to University. Neil and I were there for two hours, introducing the young people to the work of Ultralab globally followed by an hour session called ‘An Introduction to Animation’. Due to the time limitations we decided to set the young people our quickest challenge, which is the start with a clay ball and return it to its original state by the end of their work. Each young person received an email copy of their work, those with Bluetooth telephones left with their work on their phone. DVD’s were also made for all the participants.

Ultralab also ran the entire Essex based Summer School on behalf of the Anglia Ruskin University, a week long event, you’ll find information on that project here on the website. Ultralab has been running Anglia Ruskin’s Summer School’s for the past five years, this was the last time we will be working with John Butcher, Director of Summer Schools. John leaves the University at the end of the month to pursue new avenues, we wish him the very best luck for the future.

Here is the work created within the one hour period from the five participating groups within the one hour period:

Anglia Ruskin Unviersity’s Ultralab, the world class learning, technology and research centre was invited to present our work. Ultralab team members speak at conferences and seminars, we disseminate our research findings and radical action research projects to governments, corporations, charities and academics globally. Malcolm Moss and myself were kindly invited and headed to Jesus College in Cambridge to present the research of Ultralab to a collection of individuals interested in new and emerging technologies and how Ultralab are using them within teaching and learning.

I introduced Ultralab, its rich history of projects and the achievements over the past twenty years. I spoke about UltraSMS, developed by Ultralab’s Tim Ellis, we introduced Tim’s new ‘SMS Voting’ feature, which went down well with the audience, who enjoyed the ‘visual’ voting.

Malcolm spoke about our work on ‘Gearbox’, ‘eViva’, ‘Plone’, ‘Ultraversity’ and various other Ultralab innovations and our uses of current open source software.

It was good to present with Malcolm, we were also provided with a Christmas dinner celebration in the evening in a room next to the famous chapel, we stayed the night in the College accommodation.

The college is beautiful, the slab floors are wearing with hundreds of years of footsteps, the rooms are warm, drenched in history and amazing to see first hand.

It was also an experience staying in the accommodation the students use, knowing that a few hundred years worth of undergraduates have worked from the rooms. Jesus College is meant to be one of the most haunted of the colleges in Cambridge, sadly the arranged Ghost Walk was cancelled.

It is amazing how small the world is coming, the event co-ordinator, Catherine Bone, taught me HTML when I was at University, eight years ago.

Interesting reading:
Jesus College Cambridge, a history