They may not be as good as previous sets, but they’re good discussion-starters & easily-printed A4-size. I used the excellent free font Quicksand to create them, and some simple vectors combined with facts & figures gathered online and from Wired Magazine’s Wired Index segment. I tried to steer clear of predictions & easily-outdated figures where possible.

26 A4-sized posters in PNG format. Download the collection in a .zip archive here.

I’m currently presenting at an SSAT seminar entitled ‘How to make ICT the most popular subject in your school’, having been very kindly invited by Nick Jackson. I’m hoping to expand on this post tonight after the event, but wanted to post my presentation for anyone following on Twitter, or anyone with an interest in pushing the envelope when it comes to content in ICT lessons.

My presentation is entitled “The History of War… in ICT”, and looks to discuss how technological discoveries have often been fuelled by military research & development.

Watch the presentation online, or download it as a .zip file – needs Adobe Flash Player in order to play.

Our World: Cracking Walls

The Iranian elections fast became a trending topic on Twitter last summer as Internet-savvy Iranians protested the inevitable re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. This is the first documentary I’ve seen that looks at the impact the Internet is having in the Middle East. From the blurb: “BBC reporter Jiyar Gol travels across Iraq to discover the extraordinary impact the internet is having politically and socially in the country.” Posted on the BBC iPlayer today, so it should be available for a month – well worth watching.

Making Sense of Privacy & Publicity – Danah Boyd

Danah Boyd gave an excellent keynote speech about privacy & publicity at SXSW earlier this month, discussing people’s perceptions of personal privacy in the context of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Well worth a read for anyone interested in the impact of ICT on society.

Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love – Ken Fisher, Ars Technica

It’s something we tend not to think about – certainly something we don’t feel bad about – but in this age of the freemium business model reigning supreme, using ad blocking software comes with a real cost to popular websites that don’t charge for their content.

The Myth of the Techno-Utopia – Evgeny Morozov, Wall Street Journal

A fascinating essay on the issue of freedom vs censorship online.

News roundup

• BBC News: Visualising the Internet
• BBC News: Internet access is ‘a fundamental right’
• Sony accuses Beyonce of piracy for putting her videos on Youtube – Boing Boing
• The Economics of Perfect Software: Sigpwned
• Google gets little US corporate support in Internet fight with China – New York Times

This is an event – the first resource to be posted borne of collaboration! Debbie Jones – @teach_ict – of Teach-ICT fame very kindly put together two of the handouts in this set covering the moral issues in ICT.

The social & moral implications of ICT are something we both have a passion for, yet I remember being taught about them when I was a student in a desperately dry, detached way. These handouts are designed to generate discussion – I’ll be using them with my OCR Unit 8 groups, splitting in to groups of 3 for discussion, then opening the floor up to the class after they describe their scenario. Subjects covered:

• File sharing
• Plagiarism
• Snooping
• Web addiction
• Censorship
• Web medicine

I hope they’re useful – we had fun making them!

Download handouts (PDF – 3mb)

Here’s another very simple visualisation showing a breakdown of the top 10 dotcom millionaires under the age of 30. The original list was here – I thought I’d put a poster together to answer the moans and groans from the “ICT isn’t useful” camp of naysayers. Free to download, and hopefully I’ll be able to put up links to a printing company who have offered to sell high quality prints of my posters soon. Until then, enjoy:

Download A1-sized poster (30mb)

If there is no citation for images, it’s because they’re from licensed stock collections, or they’re mine. The entire collection (of 17 posters at the time of writing) weighs in at around 145mb with each file being 300 DPI A3 size. I haven’t finished yet, and I’m more than happy to hear suggestions for posters you’d like to see – just add them in the comments at the bottom of the post.

Examples:

Download the entire collection as a zip file (192mb).

Update (22/08/09): Thanks to Chris who kindly let me know that box.net impose bandwidth restrictions on their free users. The posters are now available to download from james-greenwood.com as well as box.net. I’m uploading a zip file of the entire collection as I write this.