I just want to say that this week’s Heroes is UNREAL. It’s so amazing. everything you need:
It could almost be real life! I ♥ Peter Petrelli.
You’ve four days left to catch it on the iPlayer.
I’ve been wanting to write something about the rise in horrific acid attacks for some time but it’s just so difficult. The stories I read are heart-breaking. One particular story I read today is about an Iranian woman called Ameneh Bahrami, a victim of a vicious acid attack in 2004.
In all honesty though I don’t know what angers me more, the fact that this awful thing happen to her or the fact that she is battling to punish her attacker with the acid treatment. Yes you read correctly, she is willing to condone the blinding of Majid Movahedi with acid under a court order. A blatant violation of basic human rights! She says “if I don’t do this and there is another acid attack, I will never forgive myself for as long as I live” but hang on a minute two wrongs don’t make right. I know there’s a lot of people who’d suggest ‘an eye for an eye’ serves as some kind of justice (it certainly does in Sharia Law). but seriously people, you can accept pouring acid into some-one’s eyes is some kind of redemption! She is making a decision to accept the use of acid to disfigure Movahedi and so surely she’d never be able to forgive herself for that either for as long as she lives.
I obviously agree that this man should be punished, left to rot in a cell somewhere for a very long time but come on. Ameneh knows first hand what it’s like to have acid poured all over her, the pain she suffered I’m sure still plays on her mind day-in-day out, the surgeries shes needed and her recovery would certainly have broken her spirit yet to want to condemn someone else to this kind of treatment is unfounded, it’s completely absurd and it frightens me much more than the initial attack.
The Progression Women’s Association is an NGO based in Pakistan ‘fighting against the horror of violence against women’ and Shabnaz Bokhari is a remarkable woman. We need more of these!! There is also The Campaign and Struggle Against Acid Attacks on Women (no website), a voluntary organisation in Southern India striving to help victims of acid attack. Whilst alls I can do is raise awareness, these women risk their lives to speak out and I applaud their courage.
Unfortunately Craft magazine have printed their last magazine! Volume 10 of Craft is to be the last printed edition and the future of Craft remains in the hands of the online community. I think this is rubbish!
As much as I enjoy the blog I look forward to the print edition hitting the door mat and continually use all back issues for reference and inspiration.
Rubbish rubbish rubbish.
From the Crafters behind Craft:
Two and a half years ago, inspired by the DIY creativity of a growing number of indie crafters, we launched CRAFT Magazine along with its companion website, Craftzine.com. Since then, we’ve become an integral part of the new craft community. We’ve been fully committed to encouraging more people to discover the joy of crafting.
All along, we have noticed that Craftzine.com has been growing steadily. At the same time, we’ve come to realize that there were more and more challenges in publishing CRAFT as a print magazine, especially with the costs of print and distribution rising, and diminishing interest among advertisers in print. So we’ve decided that Volume 10, our Celebrate Like Crazy issue, will be our last print issue and that the future of CRAFT is online.
Creating a print magazine was a great pleasure for all of us on our amazing team, and we’ve appreciated the many readers who told us how much they enjoyed CRAFT. Our print magazine helped to gain recognition that craft is thriving today, more than ever. We’re going online exclusively with CRAFT because that’s where we can best reach and serve our audience.
On Craftzine.com, we have a talented team, led by Natalie Zee Drieu, who is returning from maternity leave. She’s excited to expand our efforts online. We have a lot of work to do to bring the best of the magazine to the website but the team has started to pursue that goal. We will focus on bringing you more craft projects, just as the print magazine did but we’ll be able to do so with greater frequency. We want CRAFT online to be visually appealing and easily accessible; we want it to be fun but also useful. CRAFT will continue to venture into new territory, creating projects that integrate high tech wizardry and high fashion.
I also want to assure you that craft and crafters will continue to be an important part of the program for Maker Faire. We have always regarded crafters as we do makers, a creative vanguard who are remaking the world in ways that are especially vital today. Also, we will continue to publish MAKE magazine in print. The closure of CRAFT in print allows us to focus our limited resources on growing a single DIY magazine instead of two.
As we’ve talked to some of CRAFT’s contributors and advertisers about our decision, we felt that they understood why we made the decision. Nonetheless, the initial reaction is one of disappointment. I suspect many subscribers will feel the same way. However, as we talked about the future with all these stakeholders, they also became as excited as we are about the possibilities. I look forward to exploring what lies ahead. I hope you will join us as we share our deep interest in, and appreciation for, the diverse approaches to CRAFT on craftzine.com.
If you ever needed any more proof that Propagandhi are the best band in the entire world. look no further. March 10th sees the release of their new record Supporting Caste, but if you can’t wait that long (I can’t) you can download two exclusive tracks from their website, providing you donate to one of three organisations:
Needless to say my donation goes to the Sea Shepherds and I think YOURS SHOULD TOO (although all are seriously worth while)! These guys need more money to succeed in shutting down the illegal slaughter of whales. Help them out!
My two most visited websites now optimised for the iPhone. Genius!
lexrigby.com/heatworld.php and lexrigby.com/reddit.php
Feel free to steal them! What more could you need in life?
I was pointed in the direction of this interesting post from On the edge of consciousness the other day concerning more library book vandalism! God does it annoy the hell out of me. even if it is only a red cross on the questionable Shah’s face.
Last week I attended my second Teaching Commons 2.0 entitled ‘Social Bookmarking: What is it and how can it be used in Higher Education?’ The commons is quite an informal discussion for both staff and students to come together and talk about their experiences of using web 2.0 technologies and how they can be applied to learning and teaching. This time Jamie Wood from the Inquiry Based Learning department opened the session, describing an activity in which he asked a group of students to use the social bookmarking tool Delicious to ‘tag‘ reading related to the course material.
At a grass roots level, for those not in the know, Delicious is a web 2.0 application used to bookmark webpages so that you can record and store your journey around the web. The good thing about using Delicious in this sense, as opposed to the bookmarking feature in any web browser, is that your bookmarks are held centrally – available from anywhere at anytime (providing you’ve an Internet connection) – and not restricted to the machine on which you made the bookmark. And by applying descriptive tags (keywords) to your bookmarks they become much easier to manage and organise.
So in this particular exercise Jamie encouraged his students to add two to three bookmarks a week that included one primary (deep links to subscription databases are supported – provided users are signed into their accounts), one secondary and one ‘other’ source such as a podcast or non-academic paper that related to the week’s topic. To this bookmark his students were also asked to add a short summary and descriptive keyword ‘tags’ to essentially categorise the resources. But, what Jamie seemed to be missing in his discussion was the reasons why we should bother to tag at all – This came later.
There are many reasons why people tag but generally I think these fall into four categories:
This last point seemed to form a great debate during the session as it was argued out as to whether it was more useful to create tags from predetermined categories or to opt for unstructured descriptions that even allow for spelling mistakes. Personally I’m in favour of the folksonomy arguments in that I prefer to write my own tags to create a more meaningful picture of links that I’m in control of. After all, creating a hierarchical taxonomy in tagging behaviour does seem to be the exact opposite of the general agreement of web 2.0 applications being collaborative networks.
Rather than asking students to sign up for individual accounts (which can be problematic due to the acceptance of third party terms and conditions) they were given access to a designated account set up by Jamie and all encouraged to tag items with their names (to distinguish between participation in the exercise). Generally I’d agree that this was a good work around the terms and conditions thing but in real life it meant that the social aspect was somewhat redundant with no opportunity to use the network features in Delicious to monitor peers etc and with students more technically keen or able than others the free riders were likely to become alienated from the group.
In conclusion Jamie indicated that the exercise had been well received with positive feedback communicated to the group. During exam time in particular students were appreciative of a designated resource bringing useful information together in one place with a searchable topic index. He’s intending to run the exercise again next year but using Diigo instead of Delicious and so it’ll be useful to see how they compare and whether one is more suited to the user’s needs than the other.
Donate online via the official Sea Shepherd Conservation Society donation page to help preserve marine wildlife, enforce international anti-whaling conventions and protect our seas.
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