Tories 2.0

I went along to hear George Osborne speak at the RSA yesterday morning about the internet and was very impressed. Normally, listening to politicians talking about technology is a bit embarrassing. They fall into lots of very obvious traps and sound very naive.

But the shadow chancellor has met the people, read the books and obviously spends a fair amount of time online (using Firefox which earned him extra brownie points). The speech should be a real wake up call to Labour and the other parties. It made me realise quite how far behind they are.

Read the full speech here.

It had to happen

Demos has a MySpace page.

It’s in advance of the launch of Their Space: Education for a Digital Generation by my friends Hannah Green and Celia Hannon. I helped out a bit with the research for the project and it’s been fascinating to work on. Hannah and Celia have done a brilliant job at bringing it all together and writing what I think is one of the best Demos reports for quite a while.

The piece basically takes apart the myth of ‘digital danger’ for teens. It suggests that schools in particular should have a lot more faith in kids ability to navigate the online world and should rearrange the way that IT is taught to put the kids in charge. The findings (which are all about kids in the UK) mesh neatly with things we’d learned about the US from danah boyd’s work.

There’s a podcast about the report here and it will be out as a pdf shortly. Well worth a read.

I want a green Apple

I’m a big Apple fan. I have an iPod and my last two laptops have been Apples. They’ve all served me very well and I like being part of the “mac fraternity’.

But there are two things that worry me: firstly their growing insistence on DRM on music and video and secondly the environmental impact of their technology. They did pretty badly in a comparison of different manufacturers.

Now Greenpeace have created a constructive campaign to get Apple to change. I’ll be buying a new machine early next year. I’d like it to be an Apple but will make my decision based on how they respond to the campaign. It will have to be good — as the Greenpeace site puts it:

“We’re not asking for just “good enough.” We want Apple to do that “amaze us” thing that Steve does at MacWorld: go beyond the minimum and make Apple a green leader.”

[via the wonderful Worldchanging]