7 August 2008
I’ve been at Jiva for a month now and it’s time to pull myself away from the code. For the last 4 weeks Jon’s been mentoring me, which outwardly looks like an excuse to pop down to Baristas (never a bad thing), but it’s really to help me along with my personal development. We both [...]
28 July 2008
As a part of my job I find myself being introduced to all sorts of new ideas and the latest of these is using the Scrum methodology for running projects.
Scrum is an agile methodology that aims to empower the developers and also be flexible enough to realise that specifications change over time and creates a [...]
21 July 2008
Now for me and people of my generation when you start talking about Hobo the first thing we think of is a TV show from the late 70s, early 80s that featured a dog that was kind of a working class Lassie, wandering Canada saving the day.
Hobo means something a bit different in the Jiva [...]
15 July 2008
Clay Shirkys Here Comes Everybody is required reading here at Jiva and even if your humble blogger does have some issues with how well it works as a book I do fully subscribe to the concepts and ideas that Professor Shirky writes about.
So I was very interested to come across a couple of videos where [...]
10 July 2008
So I typed Jiva into the all knowing Google and lo and behold there was a Wikipedia entry so I thought I would have a look.
Apparently Jiva in Hinduism and Jainism is a ‘living being’. Now that makes us ‘Living Being Technology’ which given our focus on the concept of People Search with Beanbag and [...]
9 July 2008
As well as our shiny new website there are a couple of new faces at Jiva this week.
Theo joins us from web hosting company Krystal as a developer and apart from briefly killing the wifi on his second day is settling in and itching to get his hands dirty. He is a graduate of Southampton [...]
9 July 2008
As you can see we have given the Jiva website an extreme makeover and very happy we are with it to! The site continues to run on the wonderful Wordpress but thanks to the stirling efforts of Chris Berridge and Juan Kennaugh it now has a wonderful new design that fits better with [...]
12 May 2008
“Cut, take two and…. Action”
It was a freezing February morning when I filmed Jennifer Mactaggart presenting her first ever video-tutorial. Just two weeks previously we’d decided to pool her talents as a tutor and mine as a film-maker to create educational videos for GCSE students. So here we now were on Bristol’s floating harbour, filming [...]
30 April 2008
I’m currently reading Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations by Clay Shirky, which is a cracking good read. There is one passage early in the book which really resonates with what we are trying to do with Beanbag.
From Sharing to Cooperation to Collective Action For the last hundred years the big organizational [...]
14 March 2008
The DCSF campaign to get teachers working outside of the classroom has been boosted this week with the launch of the Teaching Outside of the Classroom website. The aim is for trainee teachers to go on placements during their training at non-school educational sites, such as adventure centres and museums. The manifesto for this was [...]