There is something intriguing about a curriculum that is about itself. In one sense this is always the case in education, because courses about education are always courses in education: there is a circularity between content and process, process and content. I was reminded of this when I read this piece (sent to me by Chris Bigum) which is about a machine that has been designed to do no more than switch itself off.

Article by Matt Precey

"An exclusive survey carried out for BBC East has revealed an epidemic of plagiarism in schools and colleges where material is copied off the internet and passed off by students as their own work."

Ethnographers sometimes talk about their use of the 'ethnographic present' in their writing. In classical ethnographies, the accounts that were 'written up', often some years after the field notes were 'written down', disguise the fact that communities had changed, or even disappeared in the spaces between words. There is slippage in the process that suggests a timelessness, and insulation from social change and presents the world as stable, cultures as continuous and enduring and an image of 'other' societies as distant from our own actions.

10.30am
Today is a holiday for everyone and a festival for the Moslem House (Ramazan). We arrange to meet the children in the Activity Room at 10.30 and they are there waiting for us long before we get there.

We take two cameras around the village, which was one of the things they mentioned on the first day they wanted to photograph and this is the first time we have had daylight hours to do it. They take us to the duck pond, to the rose garden and to the village entrance. And along the way, as always, they improvise when the opportunity arises. They can't resist posing with the statue of Hermann Gmeiner, with the staff motorcycles and next to the Village car. The gate Watchman, tries to control them and keep them off the garden, but they are simply too quick, so he takes the opportunity to tell me that he was for many years in the British Army, and was stationed in England and Scotland, and served in Rhodesia and Nepal, and proudly formed part of an honour guard for the Queen when she visited India.

8.30 am
I spent the early part of the morning getting the journal up to date and organising the photo files. I now have enough material that could not be replaced that I am getting nervous about the risk of losing or accidentally deleting files, especially when the children are playing with the laptop. I also wanted to see if I could find the best way of copying photofiles on to CD so that the Village can see them on their own computer. The problem is that if I copy straight from iPhoto then they will not open on the PC, and if I copy them as jpeg files from the finder the Office still can't open them because they do not the appropriate software. The office machines are running Windows 95 and don't have Photoshop or equivalent software but Shobha says they can get it. The other problem I discovered is that if I copy on to CD from an iPhoto album for my own files then once I have ejected the CD I cannot reload it and copy additional files, even if it is only a quarter full, because it reads the file as already recorded. This is something I will have to investigate further. So far the help file in iPhoto has allowed me to find out how to do most things but I have yet to check this one.

3 am
I slept soundly until sometime after 2 am, woke up from a vivid dream and then could not get back to sleep. Maybe the funfair had shaken up a few too many brain cells! Mostly I was thinking about the project and thinking about what I would have to share with Peter, Gerhild and Barbara at the end. I was now far enough into it that the project had set its course and it would be difficult to change direction. My main worry was that what I had done was give the children access to the technology, shown them just the beginning of its capabilities, and soon I would take it away from them. The idea began to form in my mind that perhaps I should leave one camera behind when I go.

Sunday - our big day out. The plan was to take the children to Fun World. This is a park where there are rides (the children call them games). We travelled on the Village bus and the driver and Mrs Kaur from the office came with us, as well as Shobha and me.

My first thought was that the children would have a good time but I wasn't sure how it fitted into the project plan. But one of our commitments was to take photographs in locations of the children's choosing and this was definitely their first choice. My concern was that they were choosing for different reasons and that they just wanted to have fun. But then I thought that is exactly what we should be doing - giving them the chance to have fun and then thinking about what having fun means to them.

9 am
I spent the morning printing the pictures from yesterday. All the photos from last night turned out well and only one was a little fuzzy from movement. The camera works well in the dark picking up background objects as well as the foreground without bleaching out close up objects too much or reflecting too strongly of glass surfaces. Later Shobha came and we printed a few more pictures that she wanted and then stuck the set on to large sheets of paper to display them.

8.30am
I had not planned to visit the Kindergarten until later, not knowing how late I would sleep. As it happened I was awake fairly early and so decided to print the photos we had so far.

I unpacked the equipment, found adapters for the power and start to set everything up. Then I realised that I did not have a cable to connect the camera to the printer. I had a Firewire connector but found that I needed a USB. I could not understand how I had the mistake. I remember removing some of the unwanted cables when I packed but could not remember this one. Disaster! I was angry with myself and disappointed. I unpacked everything twice but it was not there.

10.30 am
A visit to the kindergarten. I spent two hours in the kindergarten talking with the teachers and observing a very active lesson in which the children chanted rhymes with movements and watched the children have lunch. The lesson was taken by one teacher with the other two assisting, which made it easy for them to talk with me. The atmosphere is very relaxed and the teachers are well in control. The kindergarten is not a central focus for the study but is an important part of the village and I wanted the teachers to know who I was and what I was doing.