Bose Acoustic Wave® Music System II

"Wave" - Patti Smith Group

I have just bought an Acoustic Wave® Music System II for the family room. As my wife and I share this room, it had to sound good and be unobtrusive. It also has to rock like Phil Lynott drinking with Alex Harvey in The Speakeasy.

Like many people, I find Bose products over priced (I bought mine from e-bay) and they do not provide what I would call true hi-fi. *But* they make really usable products, that sound great and that you can enjoy in living areas of the house (come round to the music room and I will play you some ugly hi fi that would make Phil and Alex reach for another sharpner). I find that the Acoustic Wave fills the room with enough of the Byrds live at the Albert Hall to fill my chest cavity while working out on the cross trainer, which is important. On the other hand, for a AU$2000 system it is penny pinching not to get the Wave® Music System Premium Backlit Remote Control as standard (I had to order one from e-bay USA): once you get past 40 it is impossible to read standard remotes and who else can afford to buy this stuff? (Rich young people seem happy to use computers as sound sources and Bose make a really nice Companion® 3 Series II Multimedia Speaker System for them.)

Bose are *not* the Apple of hi-fi, which is what I think they aspire to be, but they do make some neat products. On the basis of this system I recommend them. We are already on the lookout for a second hand 5.1 system and I’d love an external system for the new deck.

PS If you want real hi fi for a reasonable price I reccomend Naim of Salisbury, UK. Especially the new HDX Hard Disk player with Burr-Brown PCM1791A digital to analogue converter. Incidentally, if you love pre-loved hi fi and live in the UK, then you cannot do better than visit the nice man at Tom Tom Audio.

'Surely she's noticed that everybody is writing science fiction now?'

"And it stoned me" - Van Morrison

This is rather off topic but, since I love Ursula K Le Guin and Jeanette Winterson, finding out that Ursula had reviewed Winterson's The Stone Gods was something I just had to share.

I bought a copy of The Stone Gods in Adealide shortly after I moved to Australia. As the first full-price book I had bought in Australia, it will always leave a large hole in my mental wallet! Books are expensive here. In this case it was worth the $. The Stone Gods is a great read.

Always Coming Home - a paper accepted by the UCFV Research Review

"I left home too young" - Bob Dylan

The UCFV Research Review have accepted a paper I wrote with Ms Aurélie Owens* of Cranfield University, entitled 'Always Coming Home: Applying Force Field Analysis as a Structured Approach to Eliciting Ongoing Organizational Contexts and Requirements for Flexible Learning'.

The paper is about helping academic and professional university staff to engage with flexible learning. We will argue that flexible learning is, in Ursula LeGuin’s phrase, “always coming home” because transformations to flexible learning can never be complete. This notion suggests that flexible learning actually requires a constant personal and institutional commitment to change management and staff development. The paper features a tutorial on applying Force Field Analysis (Lewin, 1951) to drive staff development workshops to engage academic and professional staff in the personal and institutional changes heralded by flexible learning. It also includes reflections (Schön, 1983) on the use of Force Field Analysis from a facilitator and a participant observer. This is an example of practice-based research (Bourner and O’Hara, 2000), which enables professionals to make informed decisions about if, where, and when to use a particular method. As The UCFV Research Review is not a specialized educational journal, we will introduce flexible learning, its critiques and some of the burning issues which herald widespread change to individual practice and institutional structure in higher education.

References

• Bourner, T. & O’Hara, S. (2000). Practitioner-centered research, in: Bourner, T., Katz, T. & Watson, D. (Eds.) New directions in professional higher education (Buckingham, SRHE/Open University Press).


• Le Guin, U. K. (1985). Always Coming Home. New York: Gollancz.


• Lewin K. (1951). Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper and Row.


• Schön, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.

*Aurélie Owens has been active in the plagerism debate.

Upcoming conferences

"Hey, Eddie, can you lend me a few bucks,

And tonight can you get us a ride?"

- Bruce Springsteen

This year I plan to attend the following conferences:

• 6-9th August, 2008, Perth, Archives: Discovery and Exploration Australian Society of Archivists (attending)



• 2-5th September, 2008, Alice Springs, dreaming08 ALIA 2008 Biennial (attending)



• 7 - 10th September 2008, Sydney, Adopting & Adapting 25th International Convention Records Management Association of Australasia (presenting)



• 20-21 November 2008, Adelaide, The ATN Assessment Conference 2008 will be held at on 20-21 November at the University of South Australia (representing CWIS)



• ASCILITE Melbourne, Deakin University, Nov 30 - Dec 3 2008