Over the past few months I have been working on a project, with a number of friends and colleagues, to create a feature film about technology.

The film, called Latitude, follows two technology addicts who discover, through a hobby known as Geocaching, a secret that sends them on a journey to California to uncover the ultimate technology. Here’s a bit more about the film here:

The film will ask important questions about our contemporary fascination with technology. In many ways it will be a metaphor for examining themes such as technological fetishism and the Church of Apple, freedom and the web as well as surveillance and open culture. We are currently exploring innovative ways to shoot and distribute the film, actively using the analogue and digital technologies that the theme of the film will be dealing with. We are also planning for the film to be accessible and experienced in new ways: such as through the activity of Geocaching and other geo-locative modes. It’s an exciting project for me as it will be a culmination of a number of ideas that I have been working on over the past few years.

Anyway to the point of this post. We are currently asking for financial and promotional support for the project. We have set up an IndieGoGo campaign with a number of ways for contributors and collaborators to support the project. If you would like to show your support for the project please check out the campaign here. Or email me via woodbridgepj (at) gmail.com

Thanks

Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life — with life understood both philosophically and biologically — which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life such as air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals. Taken together, they constitute an engaging interdisciplinary resource for researching and teaching relevant science issues across the humanities, a resource that is capable of enhancing the intellectual and pedagogic experience of working with open access materials.

All the books in the series are themselves ‘living’, in the sense that they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research — along with interactive maps, visualisations, podcasts and audio-visual material — into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus engaged in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad. The book that I worked on, along with Janneke Adema, explored the way that concepts and ideas around the theme of Symbiosis can be applied to a number of areas within the (digital/networked) humanities.

Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions: Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent. Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and published by Open Humanities Press (OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org).  The Editors of the series are Clare Birchall (University of Kent), Gary Hall (Coventry University), Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London). Other members of the project team include Sigi Jőttkandt (Open Humanities Press), David Ottina (Open Humanities Press) and myself (Coventry University).

In January 2012 we’ll be launching our Free and Open Undergraduate class exploring Creative Activism

This class will explore the potentials of creative media activism through encouraging ‘live’ creative interventions and participation in cultural, political and social debates.

Throughout the 10 week class we will be exploring how media activists and campaigners have used their media knowledge, connections and skills to ask difficult questions, provoke debate and raise awareness of important issues and problems in their local, national and international communities.

Choosing an issue that is important to them, participants in the class will work on a number of real and situated tasks that will aim to provide them with a number of new knowledges and skills.

By being run as an open community it will enable participants to constructively critique, learn from, build on and collaborate with each other to produce a body of work that will, hopefully, make a practical and positive mark on the world.

If you’d like to get involved, or just stay up to date with the work of this class, please join us here.

Filmed as part of the Migration Aware project I have been working on in the City of Ibadan in Nigeria, Africa. More to follow soon.

Over the past few months I have been working with Jonathan Worth and the Photography Team at Coventry University to develop an iPhone App for a free and open undergraduate course called ‘Picturing the Body’.

The ‘trendsetting’ app has been mentioned by the British Journal of Photography, PDN Pulse, Times Higher Education and Professional Photographer Magazine. It has been described by one of our collaborators as ‘an innovation in photography education’ and by Wired’s Rawfile team as ‘Blowing minds & shifting paradigms in photo education’.

The beta App allows people to engage with the community of practitioners and students who are taking part in the course. Pulling in photographs from Flickr, content from the blog, comments from Twitter as well as a range of photography podcasts from our iTunes U Project.

The intention is to see whether mobile applications can enhance the experience of being involved in the course and to help us to think about future developments in this area as part of our mantra for Open Media at Coventry University. Since the launch of this app, we have been involved in developing a number of innovations for mobile based learning, including the launch of the MediaPRO – Media Production Course App

To download the visit the PICBOD App in the iTunes Store and to find out more about the course please visit the PICBOD website.

(The image at the top and on my homepage – Crash Courtesy of Jonathan Shaw)

The Picbod App was developed as a part of my Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education. You can find the poster presentation of the PICBOD App here. Thanks to all the colleagues, students and other people who were involved in its development.