I travelled up to London on Sunday night to meet the guys from the RUGroom project at City College Norwich in preparation for Professor Stephen Heppell’s ‘Be Very Afraid’ on Monday.

The students from RUGroom were showing off their creativity in the form of GeoArt!  

Here is some GeoArt one of the groups made while at the event!:

Wow!  What an event!  I’ve written about it on our digital creativity website!  To read what I wrote, click this link….

I find it amazing that National Express have chosen to promote their new dot2dot shuttle bus service (in their in train magazine) by having a pop at the overcrowded London tube.

I find the overcrowded mainline trains run by National Express could really do with more carriages (see pictures) before they start pointing an ‘overcrowding’ finger at another operator to which they plan to compete with.

I really dislike National Express, does it show?

Chelmsford Borough Council: Victor says put all your staff up in the Boreham ‘Premier Inn’ hotel on a Sunday night. Get all staff to drive as far as Tesco Springfield Road at 8:30am on the Monday morning from the hotel, taking notes along the way.

Since 1997 (the past eleven years) I’ve had to ‘rush hour commute’ from Witham to Chelmsford in order to get to University (1997 - 2000), first job (2000 - 2006) my own company (2007- now).

Because of the nature of my business I have to drive, and need a car available during my day in order to get to clients, schools, etc… I also car share with my fiancée (Justina) who also works in Chelmsford, driving is the most cost effective way to get to work.

We start our journey from close to point ‘A’ and get to point ‘B’ usually very easily (usually no more than 15 minutes).  Its getting from point ‘B’ (the end of Springfield Road in Chelmsford) to point ‘C’ (my office car park) where it all goes horribly wrong, and has done for the past eleven years (except when schools are on holiday!)

When we hit the end of Springfield Road (see the red x below) it can take up to (and over) half an hour to drive half a mile to ‘B’ where I work and Justina walks to ‘A’.

Springfield Road is one of the main roads into the town, a narrow road which can longer cope with the volume of vehicles using it. Traffic joins the road from side streets, busy junctions (with traffic lights) and is slowed further by stupidity, such as a refuge collection lorry picking up bins during rush hour.

I’ve been timing the route from the X point using the stopwatch feature on my phone.  Here is the 32 minute  nightmare journey time getting from ‘X’ to ‘B’ today…

I put it to Chelmsford Borough Council that they need to do something to improve access to Chelmsford for people coming from the Colchester bound direction of the A12, it is quite simply a joke.

I’m not sure how things have improved in the past eleven years for people coming from the London bound direction but I’ve noticed how increased traffic volume has just made things get worse and worse in the past few years.

Something needs to be done.

Have you tried Chelmsford Park & Ride?

• No. It costs £4.40 per day for two of us (£2.20 each) to use, and parking is already free at my office.
• I need a car to hand for use during the day for the nature of my business, I don’t want to have to catch a bus to get to it.
• Chelmsford Park & Ride is too far out of town, and requires passing Chelmsford in order to get to it.
• I hear frequent complaints that Park & Ride is infrequent and overcrowded, I often see the black bus with lots of people standing and swaying about.
• The time taken to get to ‘Park & Ride’, park, get a bus, transit, walk to office would probably be almost the same as the time sat waiting in traffic on Springfield Road to park in a space right outside the place of work, and would cost £4.40 more than by going by car for the whole journey.

Why don’t Justina and yourself take the train each day?

• The day rate for the nine minute return train journey (Witham - Chelmsford - Witham) is £5.80 per person per day, so for us that would be £11.60 a day (£58 a week, £232 a month) and we currently spend £30 in fuel per week (£120 per month).  An equivalent nine mile journey on the (reliable) Spanish rail system would cost £1.45 compared to £5.80 in this country.

But you don’t need to pay a day rate you could get a rail season ticket for less!

• We don’t always work in Chelmsford. Next week I’m working in Chelmsford, Cardiff, Norwich, London and Colchester, Justina is working in London and Southampton. Buying a ’season ticket’ would be a waste of money as we would be ‘paying not to use it’. We need a form of transport that is reliable, cost effective and can be used to meet variations of destinations without being locked to one location to save money.
• I need a car sitting in my office carpark to shoot off to clients, schools, etc.  Justina uses the same car to shoot off to other branches of her company that need her support at short notice.
• In 2006 I tried commuting for a whole year and found ‘National Express’ to be unreliable, its no wonder that sites such as http://ihatenationalexpresseastanglia.blogspot.com exist.

Suggestions:

• National Express East Anglia Rail:  Don’t sell season tickets, sell journeys. Season Tickets only work for commuters who do the same journey every day at the same time.  If National Express sold me 100 discount Witham - Chelmsford - Witham journeys for say an upfront ‘£400′ I’d buy into that and use the train on days where I’m 100% certain I’ll be in the office all day, or Justina needs the car to go somewhere else.  Once the 100 tickets are used up I buy more.  Pay-as-you-go-trains!
• Chelmsford Park & Ride: Put a Park & Ride near the Boreham exit of the A12.  Charge ‘per car’ rather than ‘per person’.
• Chelmsford Borough Council: Like Victor suggested earlier… Put all your staff up in the Boreham ‘Premier Inn’ hotel on a Sunday night. Get all staff to drive to Tesco Springfield Road at 8:30am on the Monday morning from the hotel… Get them to take notes!

UPDATE!

At 8:15am (till 9am) on Tuesday 16 October 2008 Ray Clark, presenter of the BBC Essex Breakfast Show reported on Justina and my journey to Chelmsford from Witham after reading this blog post.

Thanks to Hal MacLean for this recording of the show:

 Matthew Eaves on the BBC Essex Radio Breakfast Show with Ray Clark : Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

After a couple of frustrating hours trying to get into Room 213 on Hotel Dusk (Nintendo DS) with Jeff shouting “I’ve got nothing to talk to you about” each time I knock on the door…… I finally worked out what to do after reading various cries for help from other people also stuck (in forums)…

Go back to room 215, get the 20k out of the suitcase, then go knock on the door.

How frustrating!

The new Cleveratom website went live today… Well done to all involved…

As we approach the end of our second year trading we wanted our website to reflect the success the business is having in the fields of learning, technology and creativity…. and also maintain the fresh and vibrant image Cleveratom is enjoying. 

More information, news, projects, and our products and services will be added over time.

Please let us know what you think of our new site.

Lots of investment has been made in the Eastern Region to generate new business start-ups, and at Cleveratom we are proud to be one of the big success stories. 

Our learning, technology, creativity company was formed in January 2007 by colleagues made redundant at the demise of Ultralab; the fondly remembered learning, technology, research centre which existed purely to make learning more delightful through the power of new and emerging technologies.  

Under a new flag we’ve stayed focus of challenging learning and have been working on some exciting new projects all over the country.  We’ve worked hard to build a business while running a business, it is no easy challenge. Our first day trading was conducted in the meeting room of the Essex Technology and Innovation Centre (Ongar) and for six months we lived in an office within the centre, pretty soon we started to grow.

Twenty months later the Cleveratom team have just completed the first year of working from our own offices in Chelmsford (Clever Towers).  We employ five staff, have done lots of cool projects concurrently, continue to work and develop the fields of Personalised Learning, Learner Voice, ASD and Autism, Learning Platforms, Virtual Learning, Digital Creativity, Social Software and Building Schools for the Future.  

Project partners we’ve had the pleasure of working hand in hand with so far include the BBC, NHS, MacMillan Cancer Support, London Business School, Edison Learning, Yorkshire and Humber Grid for Learning Foundation, City College Norwich, heppell.net, Anglia Rusking University, University of East Anglia, BBC Northern Ireland, Futures College, Skanska, UEA, and many more….

We’re now in the last few months of 2008, having a great time and enjoying some of the coverage we are getting to promote good business in the East…..

Here Director of Technology, Alex Blanc is featured in the Essex Business Directory:

Chelmsford Borough Council have featured Cleveratom staff Hais Deakin, Alex Blanc and myself in their ‘Best workforce’ campaign… Here we are on boards placed in public places around the county:

Here we are in ‘pocket format’….

Hal has been featured in Building Schools publications (note to self, take photo)…

And for my own 15 seconds of fame, I’m on the front page of the Exdra website…. (click to enlarge)….

Right now Nick, Alex, Hais, Hal and myself (Cleveratom) are…..

- building and rolling out safe bloggy/portfolio/social networking software for learners age 5+.

- designing schools and consulting nationwide on the Building Schools for the Future programme.

- proud to be involved in the cutting edge physical and virtual project to improve inclusion and learning for learners with autism.

- developing further the successful personalised learning software with our friends at Edison Learning.

- about to launch interactive SMS tools for audience participation at conferences.

- partnering on a new project with the NHS to explore professional networking.

- building engaging and enjoyable self assessment and learner voice software solutions.

and lots more….

Here we are supporting the Regional Centre conference 2008 running texting and podcasting…

We’re booked to be at BETT 2009 and this time we’ll be located in the ‘New Technologies Zone’ near the feature.  Here is how our stand looked in January 2008…

We’ve all been really busy and finally got round to our 2007 ‘Christmas Party’ in August 2008, plenty of strange looks from restaurant goers as we pulled crackers.

www.cleveratom.co.uk | 0845 868 9020

I don’t like iChat because my colleagues, friends and family don’t all use it as their preferred Instant Messenger client.  (iChat runs through AIM, which is owned by AOL)….  I don’t want to have to run lots of different applications to reach friends who use other Instant Messenger clients…. So, on the advice of Hais I’ve been using Adium for the past six months.

Adium has been brilliant because it is one application that lets me log in to multiple IM clients and creates a combined buddy list. Using Adium I access AIM, MSN Windows Live, Yahoo Messenger, GMail Talk and Myspace. If I used other clients I could access them too…

This morning I installed the new version of Adium 1.3, and now Facebook friends automatically join my buddy list each time they access Facebook  (I’d previously played with the beta version prior to 1.3’s release, but found it did not work for me and kept crashing).

This is how my Adium list looked first thing this morning (obviously I’ve scratched out surnames for privacy)….

Adium is also flexible and allows add-ons to be installed, the only problem now is the excellent Adium add-on which allowed me to see my Skype contacts in my buddy list is not working:

Another problem is that when I visit Facebook.com using an internet browser I keep being prompted to login, which I do, click a few links inside Facebook, then get asked to login again. I think that because Adium is also logged into Facebook this is prompting the internet browser to think I’m logging in from somewhere else and therefore logs me out.

So a few bugs to fix here and there, but another great innovation by the Adium team.

Running alongside the River Blackwater this morning on my daily run it was great to see two swans swimming the other way.

I was up at the crack of dawn this morning and on the road to Nottingham to run an animation session for an hour with young people attending the British Youth Council conference.  The conference was based at the Nottingham & Trent University, an impressive venue.

I had one hour to teach thirty young people how to animate and make their own music, and was pleased with their evaluation of how it went.  Each young person had to mark on the British Youth Council’s dart board what they thought of my session:

Click to enlarge.

To find out more about the project I wrote about it here on our www.digitalcreativity.org website.

It took me three hours to get there and six hours to get back, traffic was really bad.