David Mitchell’s regular video podcasts are often quite funny, even if you frequently finish up wanting to give the man a tequila, or at least a good shake. This week’s agonies focus on the unbearable difficulty of paying females compliments – and appropriately, the podcasts are sponsored by a company manufacturing male grooming products. Obviously I’m in no position to speculate on David Mitchell’s use of hygiene items, but I think it’s safe to say he’s not exactly a gleaming example of perfectly-groomed metrosexuality. And the people – like me – that enjoy his podcasts are probably overwhelmingly similar. Maybe market saturation has forced male grooming companies to search for lucrative new niches among the achingly awkward and self-conscious (the mumblesexuals?), but I fear they may be out of luck on this one.
Category: www
Lego and the Special Relationship
Various ‘special relationships’ could be connected with Lego, but this this entry focuses on the capitalised Special Relationship, i.e. that between the US and the UK. A wikipedia session has just led me to various Lego websites, one of which painstakingly and lovingly catalogues and cross-references every piece in every Lego set ever created. Even more exciting for the frantically procrastinating 29-year-old, the site also includes the instructions for all Lego sets which, when viewed, trigger waves of nostalgia.
But what I found most entertaining was a table which listed the respective names chosen for various space vehicles for the American and British markets by the Danish company. One, called the ‘Beacon Tracer’ in the US, became the rather pedestrian ‘Inspection Buggy’ for the UK. The excitingly rhymed ‘Vector Detector’ becomes the stubbornly utilitarian ‘Search Craft’. And the frankly over-the-top ‘Mega Core Magnetizer’ is crushingly downgraded to the ‘Mobile Recovery Centre’.
Spending a lot of time as I do with German students of English who seem to fondly regard my country as a kind of cup-of-tea period theme park where British-English-accented ladies and gentlemen play crochet with Prince Harry, and the States as the alluring, futuristic home of the kind of English they want to speak, I now see that we in the UK were programmed from childhood to understand that our mobile recovery centres, despite being the same as the American’s Mega Core Magnetizers (it’s even written with a z!), were never going to warrant the same attention.
Personal branding
A quick trawl round the ‘net has confirmed for me that you’re nothing without a personal brand nowadays. I was just trying to create a compact letter head, but that’s getting very difficult, what with the number of outlets which we now have to express ourselves publicly, and which we might therefore want to make public. Once you’ve fitted addresses for a blog, website, Facebook page, MySpace page, Bibo and Skype as well as more pedestrian information like email, or even (do people still have these?) a landline number, there’s not much space for a letter anyway. And then comes the branding issue. Does co-ordinating the look and feel of your opinion-sharing (the blog), your social networking (Facebook, Bibo) and your online credentials (website) make you a digital pioneer, keen to present yourself as a coherent and effective online personality? Or does it make you a drone; a human Big Mac so desperate for a smooth, standardised feel and appearance that you lose any semblance of the personality you’re striving so hard to create? Or does it just mean you spend way too much time online, and have probably forgotten the old-school methods of developing an interesting and effective personal brand (i.e. by being and interesting and effective personal person)? I’ve got to admit that my first impulse was to start co-ordinating everything to fit with PeriodOne’s style, but I’m now thinking that the last point does have some validity, and that large portions of the population would simply shake their heads sadly at the thought of someone devoting so much time to their virtual personality and look. And, at the back of my mind, there’s the another thought gestating and slowly becoming a monster: is it me, or is it the kind of people who, try as they might, are not able to shape their actual lives to the form that they desire who flee to the more easily adjustable parameters of the online world? Once upon a time, before they took over the world, they used to called ‘geeks’ …
Rate my teachers …
www.ratemyteachers.co.uk should strike fear into the heart of any educational professional. I’m on there already from one of my PGCE placements (with a modest 3.8 out of 5 for your information). As the Telegraph has already noted, the concept of a website through which pupils and parents can anonymously critique teachers is problematic, to say the least. What worries me most is that kids are not educational professionals. That the site offers a no-holds-barred, brutal and honest means of school or teacher appraisal in contrast to Ofsted’s staid and linguistically torturous reports is certainly an appealing notion. But, sadly, it’s all wrong. Kids can’t accurately assess teachers any more than the average person could rate a barrister or doctor. And yes, of course a teacher would say that. Yes, of course ‘if anyone should know, it will be the kids’. Well, no, of course not. We all think back to our school days from an adult perspective, superimposing our contemporary acuity of insight onto our teenage selves. Alright, but this site isn’t governed by the opinions of retrospectively insightful former pupils. It quantifies the opinions of children, quite possibly egged on by peers, and wholly unaware of the potential consequences of their actions. Michael Hussey, the site’s young co-creator (and one time supply teacher), may have hit on a GoogleAds goldmine of a idea, but his claims that RMT represents a reflective aid for teachers’ professional development is bordering on the delusional.
www.stephen-mortimer.com 