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Mostly AI and weird audio

AI Fact Checker

Deep Background GPT Released – by Mike Caulfield

I just released a (largely) non-hallucinating1 rigorous AI-based fact-checker that anyone can use for free. And I don’t say that lightly: I literally co-wrote the book on using the internet to verify things. All you do is log into ChatGPT, click the link below, and put in a sentence or paragraph for it to fact check.

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-684fa334fb0c8191910d50a70baad796-deep-background-fact-checks-and-context?model=o3

Radio is a Foreign Country

THE RADIO DIAL IS A COMPASS; THE ANTENNA A DIVINING ROD*
Welcome to RADIO IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY!, an endless stream of obscure (and mostly retro) global music and audio ephemera rarely heard outside their home region.

Curated by humans not algorithms, our livestream follows a unique mixtape format where just about anything can happen and features cut-ups of international radio broadcasts (am, fm & shortwave), field recordings, ethnographic film, vintage records & cassettes, and digital ephemera from the far reaches of the internet. Our mission is to explore forgotten and new ways of making radio and to facilitate greater access and exposure to sounds and music not sufficiently documented by the commercial music industry.

Radio is a Foreign Country

via restlesslens

Halloween is Coming

Bob Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour on SoundCloud

I’ll be missing the halloween activity in school this year this year.

Pootle Playground

Introducing Pootle Playground — My Experimental WordPress Blueprint Builder – Pootlepress

Uses AI to build a WordPress site that opens in the playground

Wiki Radio

The thrilling sound of random Wikimedia
Inspired by WikiTok, I thought I’d make something to discover sounds uploaded to Wikimedia. From political speeches and bird noises to genuine bangers, it’s mostly wholesome, though I cant guarantee it won’t play you something horrible once in a while.

Wiki Radio 📻

Hot Pi

Struggling to heat your home? Try 500 Raspberry Pi units • The Register

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An anmimated gif of a dance scene from The Leopard. Text: The ‹Ds106 Dance goes on #4life

One of the most interesting learning experiences I’ve had on or off line is DS106 a hard to describe course in digital story telling.

I’ve attached my self to a group of students veterans that are presenting at the Reclaim Open 2025 Conference, Rewilding the Network. Part of this presentation consists of blog posts around the daily create part of DS106. These are being gathered on Combobulating – Making New Connections

From my blog history I seem to have started being involved in DS106 around 2011:

Animating Gifs on a rainy afternoon

So I’ll be writing a few posts around the topic over the next week or two. This one is just to see if the syndication1 on DS106 picks up my post tagged wildDS106 when my feed gets added.

  1. On of the most important things I learnt from DS106 is the power of RSS and syndication ↩︎

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Four men sitting in a pub, smiling and talking, with pints of dark beer on two small tables. Bob, Ewan, Me & Will at the Jolly Judge.

I was tagged by Mags Amond for

tagging you next for a #TeachMeet20 looking back / looking forward post @johnjohnston

TeachMeet, a meet up for teachers, self organised and designed to keep it grassroots. The Wikipedia page is not too far from the mark. Started 20 years ago!

So I looked back. I’ve 38 posts tagged teachmeet here. But if I search for TeachMeet I find 124 posts. Searching my Twitter export finds over 300 matches. So TeachMeet has been on my mind over the years.

What I was thinking about 10 years ago: TeachMeet10: time for a TM-Reboot in Scotland?

For me TeachMeet is part of one of the most exciting periods in my teaching life. My already well developed obsession with using technology in teaching had exploded with the internet, blogging, podcasting & RSS. Twitter was on the horizon. As a class teacher I was getting to go to conferences!

Ewan MacIntosh was the main instigator of the 2006 ScotEduBlogger meet-up. After the second day of e-live conference we were all heading off to the Jolly Judge, a pub with WiFi! So excited.

The development of TeachMeet has been well covered. Mags has done an amazing job, for example.

Looking Back

I started writing some notes about TeachMeet’s past, but didn’t get past some bullet points, I am going to post them otherwise this post will take the rest of the year. Views very much IMO.

  • I remember preparing like crazy for the first ‘real’ teachmeet. My name didn’t come out of the hat1. I did speak at the second SLF one. On first and speeding through my presentation in jig time.
  • I recall another SLF one when Ewan stopped a speaker for being commercial.
  • I loved the random picker idea and the no PowerPoint rule.
  • I remember a blog post or comment by Robert Jones to the effect that the main beneficiaries was on the speakers. I certainly learnt a lot by presenting, but also in helping organise TMs.
  • I remember not liking the idea of keynote speakers, when I read of the BETT events.
  • I never really liked the freebies from sponsors. I did enjoy the free beer and snacks.
  • In retrospect I think the TM I regret missing most was an outdoor one somewhere in central Scotland with, as I dimly recall, tents & camping.
  • I met so many good people. The initial jolly judgers, the second round, small TeachMeets that spread over Scotland, and the online folk. All were full of positivity, generosity & kindness. Some passed by, some I’ve followed for years.
  • The positivity. This may have been the main benefit to me. It felt like it was from the infantry not the officers.
  • Recently I read of the Twinkl TeachMeet: hated it, asked them to change the name, got nowhere.

Looking forward

TeachMeet withered somewhat in Scotland, I am not sure why. Maybe things bubble up for a while, serve their purpose and then don’t anymore. Different times might need different solutions. Pedagoo felt to me like an evolution of TeachMeet to some extent. Its domain has gone now. My fingers are far from the pulse of Scottish education.

I am probably not the best person to ask. When the name was being discussed I held fast to Scots EduBloggers Meetup. That lacked a bit of inclusivity and was somewhat shortsighted 😃.

To me TeachMeet felt as if it was in the same category as Blogging, Creative Commons, RSS, Open Source and other things that promoted freedom and sharing. Online interactions seem a lot less innocent now than they did then. I still believe these things are important.

Lots of educational CPD now seems to be in Teams or Zoom, this misses the serendipity involved in a face to face meeting and the built in talk to your neighbour TM principle.

Other, to me, important aspects of TeachMeet which should be carried forward include: a relaxed social feeling; the flattening of hierarchy; the centrality of classroom practice and fun. We could do without freebies; involvement of leaders in setting the agenda, although they are more than welcome to share their classroom experience and technology and services without classroom practice.

The most important for me would be the selection of speakers at random, hopefully with more speakers than spaces. TeachMeeters should be willing to go along to listen to others and open the opportunity to share if it arises. Not being guaranteed a spot might lead to more spontaneous presentations, serendipity and perhaps a reason to organise the next one.

Given I’ve now retired from teaching, I do not suppose I’ll be at another TeachMeet I will alway be interested in seeing how it goes.

Postscript teachmeet.scot

I have the teachmeet.scot domain. I don’t want to keep paying for it or hosting the inactive site2. I’d love to give it to someone else who would care for it in the right way.

  1. Probably just as well I was going to talk about RSS, possible not the most interesting subject to class teachers. ↩︎
  2. The site was set up to allow folk to ask for an account and then post events. At one point I hoped that folk could be encouraged to post reports or link to reports of events to create a resource of sorts. ↩︎
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A jay in the branches of a hawthorn bush
A little Egret in a field

A dull afternoon, breezy with the threat of drizzle. Walked round the short loop on the Kilpatrick braes. As I came back on the road by the cattle grid I heard a harsh call from the ‘hawthorn field’ next to the gate. It kept going and Merlin suggested a jay. I watched for a while and saw one, moving from bush to bush, looking and calling. I could hear a crow and buzzard too. I wonder if they were getting worked up at a cat or fox. Quite a good view through my camera, the distance and dull weather making for a blurry shot. I’ve not seen jays here very often and mostly retreating. Further down in the horse field, near the drainage ditch I saw a little egret! I’ve watched a few down the Clyde recently but always on the shore. Another blurry photo.