Scotland and specifically Glasgow has one of the worst health records in the entire Western world. Glasgow is a perfect candidate for the title ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, it is a vortex of extreme poverty and wealth that has rendered the city with an undeserved scarred and spartan reputation.

It is true that Glasgow’s health record has significantly changed for the better over recent years but much still remains to be done. Government and councils have worked towards healing Glasgow’s ailments through various different projects. One of the projects currently at the forefront of such activity is named the ‘Glasgow Centre for Population Health‘. The GCPH aims to provide a ‘focus on those issues which drive the patterns of ill-health that characterise Glasgow and the West of Scotland’. The organisation ‘provides a setting where academics, policy-makers, practitioners and local people can come together’ in order to ‘help remove the ‘sick city of Europe’ label from Glasgow’.

The Spoken Word has played a key collaborative role with the GCPH by providing a platform for the recording of their seminar series. The seminar series involves a number of public lectures designed to bring a range of input from professionals and lay people on numerous health related topics. The seminars have had various distinguished key speakers opening the discussion including the philosopher A.C. Grayling and the economist Lord Richard Layard.

All of the GCPH seminar series can be found through i-Tunes or directly through our repository by clicking on the image below:

Picture Courtesy Of: bicameral

As we mentioned in a previous entry, some of the Spoken Word team attended the inaugural BarCampScotland on Saturday. The slides of our presentation, ‘Connecting Pasts and Futures: Spoken Word Services and the BBC’, are now available on SlideShare (without videos or audio, unfortunately). You can also download the slides as a PDF file directly from us at this link. [3.3MB PDF]

The event went extremely well, and we felt it was a useful chance to deliver our ideas to an audience partially outside, but intersecting with, the higher education community.

Given the volume of interest it’s hard to imagine the event not running again, and we hope that we might see a future BarCamp in the vicinity of GCU…

You can find more presentations from this weekend’s BarCampers on the appropriate SlideShare tag: BarCampScotland. Make sure to check out Andrew Middleton of Sheffield Hallam University’s presentation on pedagogical models for podcasting, which we unfortunately managed to miss at the time. You can also get a flavour of the event from Andrew’s podcast episode on it, featuring an all-too-short interview with our very own star of the show, Aidan Johnston, on our podcasting efforts (at 5:48).

Also, check out the Flickr BarCampScotland photo pool and tag pages.

The inaugural BarCamp Scotland goes ahead this Saturday in Edinburgh (See the Upcoming entry for details). The popular casual geekfests have become an important meet and greet event for academics, web developers, freelance podcasters and new media folks of all descriptions. They’re also an important opportunity for attendees to sample the state of the arts in areas beyond their immediate disciplinary remit.

Spoken Word will be there, represented by Aidan Johnston, Ewan MacPhee, Graeme West and Andrew Gruen.

We’ll be available to discuss the project in general; our repository; connected learning issues and methodologies; our relationship with the BBC; and of course all of the geeky details of running a service like ours. Any prior notification of desired topics would be very helpful (leave a comment).

We’re also, of course, looking forward to learning from other attendees, some of whom are friends of Spoken Word (see the attendee list on the wiki). Major topics look to include podcasting, community software, dynamic web application frameworks, mobile technology and open source projects.

If you’d like to meet with us at BarCamp, please leave a comment here (or use the Contact form) and we’ll get back to you – or simply come and find us on the day. Visit the wiki to add your name to the roster if you plan to drop by.