Arlene Goldbard told me late last week that David Harding, the man who more or less invented the idea of the town artist, has died.

I have linked to the self-description on his website, and to one of the obituaries you can find online. More will undoubtedly follow, and rightly so.

Over the past few years, a massive industry has emerged around dumb phones and the concept of logging off.

But is ditching your smartphone actually the answer?

In November 2019 I reported about a project that Irma Sippola and I started and which we call Snowcastle Valley. As part of this I have committed myself to teach eleven teenage girls and women, and five teenage boys, all school dropouts living below the poverty line, to code using the Scratch programming environment developed by MIT.

What follows derives from the field notes of the work I have done during our second visit, which began on December 20, 2019. I have written these notes using an Evernote template I created to allow me to record attendance, work content, observations, outcomes and problems, on my iPad as they arise during the actual workshops. In devising this template I worked from Field Notes: the making of anthropology by Roger Sanjeck (Sanjek, 1990: pp 92-97).