Looking Up at Two Oaks, I took the class down to the woods today to gather words, sketch and play a game or two. The pupils really took to sitting quietly drawing the bare trees.
Category Archives: wwwd
Maha Bali (blog.mahabali.me)This ChatGPT thing, quite apart from all the other AI writing tools, is disturbingly addictive and… likeable? I had tried before with you.com/chat to make it say mean and biased things, but it wouldn’t. And this surprised me because if it trained on internet data, the internet is full of stuff like that, right? So…
An interesting experience with chatGPT.
Who trained you to be so sensitive and polite and politically correct?
I couldn’t be angry with it, because it was such a sweetheart about not giving me what I wanted.
The FeedLand Roadmap
I’ve been testing and using FeedLand for a while now. Today Dave posted the roadmap
1. FeedLand is a feed management system for individuals and groups. So far it’s only been offered as a free service on the web.
and
4. Here’s the big news: The new FeedLand server software will be available as open source, so anyone will be able to run a FeedLand instance. It’s a Node.js application. Uses MySQL. You may want to hook up an S3 bucket for special features like RSS feeds for Likes. At first email sending will be via Amazon SES, the method I currently use. It will be possible to plug in new drivers to use other email services.
As someone who has been pretty excited about RSS for years this sounds great.
Wayback when ScotEduBlogs was a ruby app1, I had this wild idea that a visitor could create a subset of the feeds on the site, save that and view the subset in some way. I think an instance of FeedLand could do just that.
Apart from the unknown of how running FeedLand would work2 I think there are a couple of barriers:
- The lack of blogs about Scottish education, maybe twitter problems will help that).
- The lack of knowledge about RSS. Andrew McLaughlin’s post Education needs free, safe spaces for creation, collaboration and discussion. and TES Article How a return to blogs and wikis could benefit teachers | Tes gives hope there.
Most online discussion of education and even news from schools has been on twitter. I’ve always felt uneasy about that. More than ever now 3. Maybe 2023 will see a RSSurgance;-)
- Created by Robert Jones with the help of Pete Liddle and cheered on by myself.↩
- I am hoping to be able to test than soon. ↩
- For example: Twitter team responsible for removing child exploitation on site cut in half since Musk takeover, report claims and No more Tweetbot or Twitterrific on Twitter | Mashable ↩
ChatGPT for Lazy Teachers
I’ve read a bit about ChatGPT use in education, there is a lot about 1
I’ve been kicking the tyres of ChatGPT a little. Even on the surface it is quite interesting.
I have tried a couple of things that might be useful. One is to get some JavaScript functions for a little fun. It did what I wanted. The other was perhaps more pertinent to teaching.
I wanted to knock out a couple of simple cloze procedures, making up sentences is one of the more tedious tasks so I though I’d give ChatGPT a shot. I asked:
Me: can you give me sentences for 10 year old using each of these words feat feet mail male leak leek meat meet ChatGPT: Sure! Here are some sentences using each of these words: "I am so proud of my little sister's feat of climbing to the top of the jungle gym all by herself!" "I can't believe how big my feet have gotten since I was a baby." "I need to go to the post office to mail this letter to my pen pal in France." "My uncle is a male doctor." "There's a small leak in the roof that needs to be fixed before it starts raining." "I love adding sliced leek to my salads for a little extra flavor." "I can't wait to have a barbecue and cook some juicy meat on the grill." "I have to go meet my friend at the library in an hour."
So I needed to fix the spelling of flavor and asked, with typo, as in the screenshot, for another sentence for male. I got a list. I needed to adjust the one I chose to make the lion lazy too.
It was easy enough to paste that into an H5P Fill in the Blanks Content and get a cloze in Glow Blogs.
Diversion to Other Geeky Territory
The Fill in the missing blanks content in H5P takes text with the words you want to be blank surrounded by asterisks. Since I’d copied the sentences into a text editor to replace the quotations, I set the document format to markdown, selected the words and pressed ⌘-i.
I then wondered if I could get ChatGPT to add the asterisks for me, so I asked: with an asterisk before and after each word. This it did, but as it typed then it seems that ChatGPT uses markdown, so as it typed the closing astrisk the enclosed word became italic. So back TextMate for me.
ScotEduBlogs Revival?
A very interesting read: How a return to blogs and wikis could benefit teachers | Tes
Unlike social media, these older content-creation tools did not restrict the length of contributions or steal your attention every waking moment with incessant dopamine-releasing notifications. Instead, they allowed developing thoughts to be published, ideas shared and shaped, links made to like-minded thinkers, and documents to be written collaboratively – the very values cherished by both luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment and the creator of the web.
And
What was missing in 2010 was any sort of directory: a working record 1 of the many flowering blogs, themes and ideas. A “ScotsEdu” wiki would quickly establish this, editable by all, allowing for information to be updated quickly and providing a map for educators, linking ideas, papers and research.
In short, it would provide a one-stop shop to support an ongoing national discussion about Scottish education.
I saw this article via twitter after a link was tweeted by Ollie Bray. Ironically Ollie was once a very prolific Scottish educational blogger.
A working record
A working record is not missing, but perhaps un-noticed. ScotEduBlogs has a record of posts going back to 2006!
ScotEduBlogs goes back to a Wiki started by Ewan McIntosh on Wikispaces. When the list of blogs became a bit to long to follow by clicking links, we 2 created ScotEduBlogs . At first it consisted of a aggregation of posts from across Scotland and a supporting Wiki. Over the years it has shrunk to an aggregation site now maintained, in a fairly lax fashion, by myself.
The site started aggregating class & teacher blogs. After the move to WordPress I reduced it to ‘professional’ blogs. It had gained some higher education blogs, but the frequency of posts has dropped.
The article made me visit the backend of SEB for the first time in a while. Much to my embarrassment I found a request to join by the TES article’s author Andrew McLaughlin. I’ve now added his blog. The form on the site has failed to send me an email. I added a link to email me requests, which should do as a stopgap.
I took a moment to improve the menus on mobile. I also set up a mastodon account for SEB so that people can get the link to new activity in their mastodon account in the same way as they could follow the twitter account. Given the current twitter woes, I hope the mastodon account will be useful.
It might be time for a revival of ScotEduBlogs. I would be delighted to add more sites. I’d also be interested in any ideas for improving the site
Personally I rarely visit the SEB site, I subscribe to its RSS Feed in my feed reader. This gives me all the news from all the blogs in SEB without having to subscribe to them all individually.
ScotEduBlogs is now on Mastodon
I’ve just set up a mastodon account for ScotEduBlogs at @scotedublogs@mastodon.scot.
I’ve used IFTT following this post: How to Post to Mastodon From Anything Using IFTTT – K²R
If it has worked this post should flow through to mastodon after it appears on SEB.
My mind is on ScotEdublogs after reading:How a return to blogs and wikis could benefit teachers | Tes. A great post I hope to return to presently.
More Podcasting in the Classroom thoughts
On authenticity, assessment and aspiration
Sometimes I think that authentic tasks are based on the tastes and whims of the educated elite. Is a literary podcast really authentic for a 15-year-old? Are hipster food trucks really the most efficient way to learn about business? As Doug Lemov once said, it’s our role to find the shortest path to learning.
Rebecca Birch powerfully critiques podcasting and other authentic projects used in the classroom. She is writing specifically about the secondary English classroom, I can really comment on that. It did make me think about podcasting in the primary classroom though.
Podcasting has been one of my favourite classroom activities for years.
As a teacher, do I really have the real-world skills to teach interviewing, sound editing, research and the mechanics of discursive writing, on top of critically analysing a text? If I had both the time and expertise then maybe I could justify this choice. Usually, with a task like this, the crafting of the assessment itself happens through many hours of student struggle outside the classroom. It’s difficult to justify the opportunity cost.
I certainly don’t have those real-world skills. I have podcasted a bit though.
Earlier this week I tweeted from our school account:
Brilliant literacy session for the biggies today, class showed iron concentration, talking, listening and editing for flow. Working on expression and talking for an audience. pic.twitter.com/lITqLE1LNx
— Banton Primary (@Banton_Pr) December 2, 2022
When I observed my class being completely absorbed in writing scripts for their podcast. Getting primary pupils to edit their writing and think about making their oral communication effective is sometimes tricky for me. Audience, or perceived audience, can make a difference. For Scottish primary teachers at least the activity of podcasting covers a large number of the experiences we are supposed to supply to our pupils.
I don’t think a podcast needs to take so much of the classes time that it would be detrimental. Especially as it give the pupils a chance to practise so many of the skills we are trying to teach.
Had I spent several weeks teaching visual design, sound production or video production skills, those students would have been several weeks further away from their ambition to undertake tertiary study.
In the primary class at least we don’t need to spend those weeks. Audio podcasting is a lot simpler than video. We are not aiming for a professional grade BBC podcast. We are trying to give our class motivation to practise their talking, listening, reading and writing. Communication with their peers and an audience. For me simple podcasting provides a great opportunity for that.
#FeedReaderFriday 3
The idea
#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich
Feed Readers
Just after I discover RSS in the “flowering” of theScotEduBlogs community I got interested in aggregating RSS and creating specialised readers. Back in around 2006 I was blogging some ideas which lead to Robert Jones & Pete Liddle creating the first iteration of the ScotEduBlogs aggregation. Later I moved the site to WordPress using the FeedWordPress plug-in. I’d seen this in use on the marvellous DS106 site which aggregates blogs of students and open participants of the many iterations of the notorious Digital Storytelling course. The flow on DS106 has pulled in 91749 (at time of writing) posts since 2010.
ScotEduBlogs is at a bit of a low at the moment, there are not so many folk blogging about education in Scotland. I still love the idea of ‘specialist’ or community aggregations or feed readers. Of course the site has an RSS feed that can be subscribed to. Dave Winer’s FeedLand, which I noted in a previous #FeedReaderFriday, can also create ‘News Products’ with similar results.
Folk to Follow
I like to follow some human aggregators, even better if they add their own opinions. One of my favourites in Arron Davis his Read Write Collect blog is an IndieWeb style collector of replies, bookmarks and other responses. RSS.
Some of Tom Woodward’s Bionic Teaching – utan blixt consists of his harvest of links with brief comment. This might be auto posted, perhaps from pinboard? He also posts about higher ed use of technology and, of particular interest to me, his work with WordPress. RSS
This post is part of a series with a wee bit about readers and a couple of suggestions of feeds to follow.
#FeedReaderFriday 2
The idea
#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich
Back around 2005 I was learning to blog with my class and exploring blogging. I was on a train with Ewan Mcintosh going to a conference or training event. Ewan was using NetNewWire and showed me how he used it. I’d already got the app, probably from a Mac magazine cover disk, but not really understood it. Watching Ewan read, take notes & blog, everything clicked. I do not think there have been many days since I’ve not used RSS.
Feed Readers
Micro.blog if a interesting product. Part blogging service part network. To me micro.blog’s superpower is that the community is open to anyone with an RSS feed. I don’t host with micro.blog but send in a category of my blog which becomes a first class member of the community. Using the app I can read other micro bloggers, some hosted with micro.blog some elsewhere. I can also add any RSS feed to micro.blog so I can follow them without leaving the app. I don’t do this often but it is handy. The app is not my main feed reader but a handy additional tool. Micro.blog is also one of the nicest online communities I’ve come across. Manton has carefully designed it to avoid some the problems of other networks, no follower accounts or favourites. Micro.blog has a lot more than this brief note covers. Manton also wrote the Indie Microblogging book. You can read the whole thing online.
Folk to follow
So a couple of groups I find it interesting to follow via RSS
Caught by the River | RSS Feed
Caught by the River is an arts/nature/culture clash … an online meeting place for pursuits of a distinctly non-digital variety — walking, fishing, looking, thinking, birdsong and beer, adventure and poetry; life’s small pleasures, in all their many flavours — it was, and still is, about stepping out of daily routines to re-engage with nature. Finding new rhythms. Being.
Open Culture | RSS Feed Hard to describe, at the top of the page today: A List of 1,065 Medieval Dog Names: Nosewise, Garlik, Havegoodday & More. The best free cultural & educational media on the web
This post is part of a series with a wee bit about readers and a couple of suggestions of feeds to follow.
#FeedReaderFriday 1
The idea
I’ll share people’s sites I follow and enjoy. I’ll also suggest some feed readers to try out along with other related resources. I’ll use the tag/hashtag #FeedReaderFriday to encourage the website to website conversation. If you’re interested in the experiment, do come and join me and help to spread the word.
#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich
Feed Readers
Feed readers allow you to ‘follow’ websites something of the same way as you follow accounts on Twitter, mastodon and the like. Feed readers are different in that the feeds they read are, mostly, on the open web. Feed Readers use RSS to pull content from other sites for you to read. If you listen to podcasts in an app you are using a Feed Reader, the app. Podcasts like blog posts are distributed via RSS.
Chris suggests What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS) | About Feeds to get started.
My main feed reader is Inoreader. It has been the one I’ve used most since the demise of Google Reader. It allows me to quickly read or skim a lot of blogs and organise that reading in a variety of ways.
More recently I’ve been using FeedLand. FeedLand is a development by Dave Winer who has an amazing pedigree in software development, RSS in particular.
FeedLand is a really interesting product, still under development but ready for use. FeedLand allows you to collate RSS feeds either by adding them yourself or by seeing what feeds other users have added. FeedLand then let’s you to organise, categorise these feeds. FeedLand is a feed reader, so you can read the feeds you follow. FeedLand allow you to publish readers for other folk to read in a few different ways. Here is one hosted on FeedLand and one on my raspberry pi. Both are experiments at the moment. Finally FeedLand allows you to produce a simple feed. Of your own. Here is mine viewed on FeedLand.
Folk to follow
So a couple of people I find it interesting to follow via RSS
- the dailywebthing linkport one of Joe Jennet’s suite of sharing sites, three links a day. A huge variety of interesting sites. Not so much a gold mine as a gold, silver, bronze, and rock mine. RSS FEED
- CogDogBlog RSS FEED Alan blogs about education, open, WordPress & Flickr amongs other things. Great detail with a personal touch. I think I’ve been reading him for as long as I’ve been blogging. A wonderful blog.
I am going to try and post for the next couple of Fridays with a wee bit about readers I use and a couple of suggestions for follows.