We’re excited to be working with the Arts Council and BBC Academy, who have joined forces on a project called Digital Capacity for the Arts, which offers training and guidance for arts organisations around creating and distributing content and reaching audiences via mobile, IPTV and online platforms.

There are a series of practical seminars and workshops until August 2012 and a growing base of online resources, including webcasts, short films, presentations and podcasts.

You can watch all the seminar sessions from the Seminar on Audio and Audiovisual Content online here:
http://digitalcapacity.artscouncil.org.uk/videos-seminar-2/ plus a ‘Seminar in 200 seconds’ highlights video that the Kinura crew edited in lightning time.

The next event is in London in October, and it’s all about Creative Use of Archives

The twitter hashtag is #digicaparts if you want to keep up to date.

This November (2010) the Cultural Learning Alliance (CLA) is hosting The Big Link Up, a series of events to celebrate and debate the importance of cultural learning. This series of events will come together into a collective debate on the 23 November on how to take cultural learning forward.

Participants can watch the webcast from the Big Link Up Live on the 23 November and feed in their views to the live discussion via a chat room.

The Big Link-Up will debate the Campaign Questions to form a national strategy for cultural learning. The Campaign Questions are:

• What barriers do you see to the delivery of cultural learning?
• What new kinds of partnerships and online support are needed to take cultural learning forward?
• What one key idea for the future delivery of cultural learning would you like to share with other professionals?

Follow @CultureLearning or Sign Up – 3051 people and 1112 organisations have signed up so far.

I look very tired because we’d had an early start setting up a webcast for PowertothePixel further down the SouthBank at NFT and then zoomed to Tate to set up for the webcast Q & A with the aforementioned artist. This can now be watched on-demand:

Anyway, I just thought it worth mentioning all this because a) there are lots of great videos to watch on the One to One site which is part of the AiWeiwei exhibition b) that the instant video system used in this exhibition was developed by Stuart Smith who works with Kinura on live webcasting projects. Clever eh?!  :)

Join the webcast and connect via YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter here.

One Young World, nicknamed Young Davos by some media outlets, is the world’s first global youth leadership summit. Bringing together several hundred delegates age 25 and under from the world’s 192 countries, One Young World combines the social power of the Internet with the energy and ideas of global youth to address the most challenging issues of today. Founded by David Jones, global CEO of Havas Worldwide, and Kate Robertson, Euro RSCG group chairman, One Young World focuses on plenary sessions at which delegates are guided by a group of international luminaries including Kofi Annan, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bob Geldof. The inaugural London summit on Feb. 8-10, 2010, will be open to the entire globe and people of all ages through online streaming and real-time updates.

It’s called In a video-led world we all need to be creators and I thought this lovely image from WhiteAfrican on Flickr summed it up nicely. (pic licensed under Creative Commons).

Also – the sessions are all archived now and being streamed in Flash for your viewing pleasure. Watch or listen here.

The reason I’m interested in all this is not just because I work in digital media, but also because I researched this whole area from an academic perspective whilst at university. I thought it might be a good idea to publish my dissertation now, although it’s nearly 10 years old I’m sure some of the references and ideas will still be relevant. You can download it here. It’s 28 pages long, and there’s a good bibliography, which I’ve reproduced below for easy access.

I also produced a radio programme about this issue, and I remember interviewing 80 year olds learning how to use computers and going out on the street to get vox pops from a cross section of people living in London’s poorest boroughs. I was struck back then how many people didn’t even know what the internet was. Obviously a lot has changed but we still have 17 million disconnected and obviously this ties in with our less than acceptable literacy levels and the poverty we all see daily.

I hope that people like Martha and her team and Sugata Mitra who I blogged about before do help to make a real difference. As I say in closing line of my essay. The digitisation of life has only just begun, and as Langdon Winner reminds us in “This process amounts to a vast, ongoing experiment whose long term ramifications no one fully
comprehends.”

Here’s a video from the digital inclusion team too:

[This video ‘Think about it’ has been created by the Digital Inclusion Team. It sets out how they can take the opportunity to use technology as a tool for improving lives and life chances or face the risk of increasing economic and social costs. This presentation is available for anyone to place on their website or use when needing to explain the benefits of ICT in tackling social exclusion. Please email movies@digiteam.org.uk.]

DIGITAL DIVIDE – BIBLIOGRAPHY
• New Media and Politics, B. Axford and R. Huggins, Eds, Sage, 2001.
• Demos – Divided By Information: The Digital Divide and the Implications of the New Meritocracy, Perri 6
with Ben Jupp, 2001. www.demos.co.uk
• Theories of the Information Society, Frank Webster, Routledge, 1995.
• War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality, Mark Slouka, New York:
Basic Books,1995.
• Understanding Media Culture, Douglas Kellner, Routledge, 1995.
• Cybersociety: Computer Mediated Communication and Community, Steven G Jones, Ed. Sage 1995.
• Power Without Responsibility, Curran and Seaton, Routledge, 1997.
• N.Negroponte 1995. Being Digital. Hodder & Stoughton
• D.Rushkoff 1994. Cyberia*. Flamingo
• C.Stoll 1995. Silicon Snake Oil.* Macmillan
• The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens, Stanford University Press, 1990.
• The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, Zone Books, 1994.
• Digital Divide Network –
• Content and the Digital Divide: What Do People Want? By Kade L Twist
• Is closing the Digital Divide more important than providing healthcare? By Mugo Macharia.
• The Arts Online: The Role of the Arts in Bridging the Digital Divide by Victoria Bernal
• Cyber-Tricksters and Cyber-Shamen: The Other Side of The Digital Divide by Kade L Twist.
• www.digitaldividenetwork.org/mugo.adp
• Working together to deliver Information Age Government – Speech by Mo Mowlam MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office at the
LGA/IdeA Information Age Government Conference, 24 November 1999.
• Which? Online Annual Internet Survey 2000 – 11/07/2000 – www.which.net/whatsnew/pr/jul00/general/survey.html
• Broadband Proliferation in Europe: Bring on the Competition, Keith Waller, September 20, 2000 – www.streamingmedia.com

DIGITAL DIVIDE DISSERTATION: MAY 2001 by SARAH PLATT is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

#digitalbritain on Twitter if you want to follow the discussion.

This is a pretty significant moment in webTV world. It demonstrates the all pervasive use of video and how pretty much anything is possible if you have the right team and the right brains on a project. The complexity of streaming video in 20 odd languages – live and on-demand – is mind boggling. But I have no doubt it will be a success.

There will be four channels for four different types of audience: Your Parliament, Your Voice, Young Europe and Parliament Live. The parliament apparently said the project was inspired by the public’s “right to know” about what happens and hopes that it will bring “the life of the institution to its citizens in a modern and creative format.” I don’t want to get into a debate here about politics and EU regulations, the shape of bananas, etc. here, suffice to say it’s a great achievement to get this channel off the ground, and it will be really interesting to know how many people tune in. There’s an essay in all this somewhere I’m sure about the public sphere versus the political media agenda. But I haven’t got time to re-read Noam Chomsky et al just now…

From Wednesday 17th Sept 08, the channel will be online at : www.europarltv.europa.eu

I’ll definitely be watching and may report further on the content of the site, stats and so on, until the next episode of Tudors or Mock the Week on BBC iPlayer distract me that is. :)