Matthew Hutchinson

Just back from an excellent gig in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre, mostly songs from his latest albums and a few I hadn’t heard before. Strangely some of the crowd seemed to give him hassle, over the volume and lack of chat. I’ve also never seen so many people get up and walk around in a seated venue, answering mobiles and generally disturbing the show for everyone else. The musicians life is a hard one.

Here’s a rubbish video clip that captures, well nothing really;

Ray LaMontagne, Olympia, Dublin October 2007

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, have been very busy with a number of projects (and then this just happened today) – at the same time somewhere in Dublin, UPS were kindly delivering a new power adaptor to the wrong address. A new Mac Pro desktop, with Leopard is on the way, photos to follow …

NYC marathon coming up, and just a month to go … what was I thinking !

I choose not to run !

So it was this last weekend past, that I had planned to relocate from London to Dublin. After searching around for a decent carrier to ship stuff for me (the cheapest (with insurance) being around 1000£ !) I found the best and safest option was to do it myself. The plan was carefully laid out like so;

• Hire a medium sized van – pack my stuff in on Thursday night
• Drive to Dublin (via Holyhead, Wales) on Friday, un-pack Friday night, and then,
• on Saturday, drive back to London (via Holyhead, Wales),
• with a final flight back over to Dublin on Sunday, ready to start work Monday morning

Here’s the original plan on Google Maps

Ambitious you might say? I though not, I had set plenty of extra time in the plan for making the journey, even with problems. Only doing one major thing each day. Or so I thought … what I’m about to tell you, you could not dream up. I am still recovering from tiredness even today… (warning, long story below)

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Some of you may know that I work for the BBC, on a little (£150m) e-learning site, BBC Jam. It was with great frustration last week, that I learned of the BBC Trust’s decision to suspend the service, pending the outcome of a public value test – Here lies the official press release describing just that.

Along with some harsh conditions placed on the production of this service (brought about by the same complaints that have caused this suspension), the site has seen its share of challenges. But the quality of e-learning content over the last year has been outstanding, and a great deal of it (more than 80%) has still to see the light of day.

There is a story worth reporting here. Years ago £150m was awarded to the BBC for the production of Jam. The government also granted £530m in e-learning credits (over 4 years) to bolster the e-learning education industry here in the UK. Along with these grants, a set of conditions was imposed on BBC Jam, including terms stating the BBC could only cover 50% of the UK curriculum. Some questions worth asking here;

• Where did the £530m go? How is the spending of this money by schools regulated?
• Why is e-learning content in the UK still so droll? (in comparison with the richer interactive (flash-based) offerings from the BBC)
• How can some companies claim they have lost business/revenue since BBC Jam had (until now) only launched about 15% of it’s content with only a small advertising campaign?
• Why does most of the UK’s educational software market revolve around the adoption of VLE’s in schools (and locking them into a platform) – rather than content and great learning experiences?
• Should the suspension of a free e-learning service for kids ever be celebrated? and who does this really benefit?

Reaction across the web has proved BBC Jam has a lot of support. Even on sites claiming this suspension is a good idea. commentaries have quickly shot down the authors post. There is some more good discussion on the matter here and here.

Here comes the disclaimer: the views expressed above do not necessarily correspond with those of the BBC.

From the very excellent (UK Based) Media Molecule, a Lionhead spin-off company. I had an interview with Lionhead many years ago, long story short, I didn’t get it :(