Listened #1 - How it got its name and if I ruled the world from podcasts.apple.com()
Join us, Richard, Elaine and Chris, our brand new podcast and our first ever episode, as we share our desert island apps, our favourite iOS features,  our best bit of recent CPD and why we should  rule the world! Before, we answer the big question, which is and will always be... How is learning be…

I was delighted to hear my name mention on this new educational podcast coming from a trio of Glasgow teachers. A life time ago I used to work beside Richard. Very much iPad focused but lots applicable elsewhere. I’ve subbed and look forward to hearing more episodes. There was some discussion about pupils as leaders of learning and I hope this might be a theme I can find out more about.

Hearing from very Apple focused teachers will be interesting for me. Although I’ve been Mac for all of my technical life and 1–2–1 iPads in my class for a good few years my tech interests/obsessions are not iPad centred so this should be CPD for me. Apple pencils seem to be transformative in Glasgow, I’ve never even picked one up.

The podcast is of a reasonable length and is split up nicly into sections, one of which was the teams favourite iOS thing. I’d agree with AirDrop, which I’ve hammered in class for the last 8 years. Unfortunately it has stopped working for us in school at the moment, not sure why?

It is nice to hear some Scottish educators voices. There was mention of podcasting in one of the presenter’s classrooms. I am looking forward to listening to that too. I still find it puzzling that podcasting does not happen more often with learners. It has amazing potential. The fact you don’t need much in the way of hardware and in Scotland Glow Blogs can provide the hosting for free for pupils make it to me compelling.

Nice name & logo.

N.B. the link is to apple podcasts, I can’t find a generic page.

Listened to The poster’s guide to the new internet – The Vergecast | Podcast on Spotify

In episode three of our connectivity mini series, The Verge’s David Pierce explores the idea of and , two syndication models for posting on the internet that don’t rely on a single platform.

Along with the companion article POSSE: a better way to post on social networks – The Verge this was a mostly straightforward account of POSSE.

The highlight for me was listening to Manton explaining his philosophy in a very clear way. Manton always makes perfect sense to me.

One of the original premises was just, could we rebuild a Twitter-like user experience, but based on blogs?

The timeline in micro.blog is just post from lots of feeds, lots of RSS feeds, whether they’re hosted on micro.blog, or they’re hosted somewhere else.

How do we merge those together so you don’t just have a few tabs open with your favourite websites and you’re typing in the domain name, it’s more of a newsfeed timeline experience, and that’s what people want.

But if the foundation of that, if the protocols can be open, it allows us to build so many interesting apps, so many different types of experiences.

It’ll just be way better.

What is particularly delightful to me is the way Manton starts with RSS feeds. micro.blog is almost the opposite of most other networks as it doesn’t try to lock you in an any way. I’ve been using the service since the beginning, completely free of charge as I have my own blog here.

Manton is also clear on the difficulty of getting more people away from the silos and on to their own domain and using more open services.

 

The comments by Matt Mullenweg, any positive move towards IndieWeb ideas from WordPress will have a huge effect.

I was quite frustrated in looking for an RSS feed for the The Vergecast. Ironic given the subject of this episode. I finlly found it on their pod.link page. I do wish RSS feed links were not becoming harder to find.

Listened Radio #EDUtalk 5-12-12: Dylan Wiliam by David Noble from edutalk.info
Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Education: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom, and From Teachers to Schools: Scaling Up Professional Development for Formative Assessment. Dylan Wiliam (@dylanwiliam) on Twitter Welcome to…

I was thinking of Dylan Williams the other day and remembered David Noble, my partner in Edutalk partner had interviewed him back in 2012. This was the second round of AIFL in Scotland.

I gave it a listen on the way to work this morning. It is a great interview. Dylan is very positive about teaching, makes some great points and David asks great questions. I think it is still relevant 11 years later!

Well, I think that Scotland did a very good job of kicking off this process right at the end of the 1990s, the early 2000s.
So I think that the original focus was very welcome, the idea of assessment is for learning. I think people got slightly seduced by the tips and techniques rather than thinking about this as being a vehicle for teacher learning. So I think it got rather, and this may be inevitable for any innovation, it got rather packaged as being a thing that schools could do. And many schools think they’ve done assessment is for learning, and so they’re moving on to the next thing.

“inevitable for any innovation” – My emphasis.

Aiko

After listening to this I though I might like to grab some quotes so remembered I’d downloaded the free app Aiko, which is an AI-powered audio transcription, and ran the audio through it. After a hiccup when the app though the language was Welsh it seemed to do a great job. I’ve added it to the original post. David & I alway regretted not being able to provide accessible transcriptions of our broadcasts/podcasts. I am wondering about picking out some other episodes to transcribe. The audio is not attributed to the two different speakers, but I think it is easy enough to understand.

Radio Edutalk

Radio Edutalk is a project I am extremely please to have been part of. We were a bit ahead of the podcast curve, but it gave me an amazing opportunity to talk to all sort of amazing educators. It ran from 2009 till 2019 starting as an open to any contributor, mobile podcast and developing to include regular internet radio broadcasts which were archived as podcasts. About EDUtalk has a bit more information.

Listened #2 Seawilding – Scotland

On the west coast of Scotland, by the shores of Loch Craignish, a community has come together to help restore their marine environment.
When deciding on how to put something back, they identified two priority marine features they could do something about.This is a story about carbon capturing seagrass, water filtering oysters & the passionate people tirelessly working to restore both.

Really interesting listen especially about the extent of oyster beds and sea grass around the Scottish coast in fairly recent history.

In the 1790s, as many as 30 million were harvested a year from the Firth of Forth, just outside of Edinburgh.

By 1882, the Edinburgh Oyster Hall was down to just 55,000.

 

Listened Micro Camp 2023: Miraz Jordan by @miraz from YouTube()
Take the Captain’s Chair of your Micro.Blog with the MarsEdit App for Mac: Time Travel, Replicators, Warp Speed and More. May 20, 2023.

Thanks @miraz.

I huffduffed the audio from YouTube.

This was a great session about MarsEdit. Although I don’t have a micro.blog blog, I participate in the community via WordPress, it was very relevant.

I was particularly interested in the macro buttons and ApplesScript sections.

Moray has posted her Resources for my MarsEdit presentation at Micro Camp 2023

BBC Radio 4 – Word of Mouth, Chatbots 1

Like lots of other folk I’ve been reading plenty about Large Language Models, AI & Chatbots and playing with some of the toys.

I really liked Professor Bender’s approach and method. I also found this a very easy listen. My mind has tended to wander off when reading blogs post about AI. Very clear on the “not intelligent” and the risks associated with chatbots trained on large piles of language.

And specifically the things that they’re predicting is what would be a plausible next word given all the preceding words here and then again and then again and again.

And so that’s linguistically interesting that once you get to billions of words of text, there’s enough information in there just in the distribution of words to stick with things that are both grammatical and seemingly coherent.

So that’s a cool observation and it’s dangerous because we tend to react to grammatical, fluent, coherent, seeming text as authoritative and reliable and valuable.

So instead of talking about automatic speech recognition, I prefer to talk about automatic transcription because that describes what we’re using it for and doesn’t attribute any cognition to the system that is doing the task for us.2

 

  1. I subscribe to the RSS feed of this BBC radio program as a podcast, pity you can’t find the feed on the webpage.
  2. Ironically I used Aiko to get the text of the podcast for the quotes: “transcription is powered by OpenAI’s Whisper model running locally on your device”
Listened Feeding the People in Wartime Britain From National Kitchens to British Restaurants by Jeremy Cherfas from eatthispodcast.com
At the same time, during both World War One and World War Two, there were concerted efforts to feed people. It started with centrally cooked meals that people took home to eat, but soon blossomed into a far-reaching network of government-run restaurants.

Another really interesting episode from Jeremy Cherfas. I’d never heard of the British Restaurants that were more common in the midst of WW2 than MacDonalds are now. Where they came from, what happened in different places and the possibility of a return were all covered.

So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love… You get the idea! If you’re anything like me you have at times questioned how much time you’ve spent trawling through social media. You may even be worried about how much data they’ve been gathering about you, or perhaps thinking about whether or not we’re even able to escape from it all. On the podcast today we’ve got Alex Kirk, and he certainly has been thinking about all of this. So much so in fact that he’s built a social network plugin for WordPress. Listen to the podcast to find out all about it…

Really interesting podcast discussing the Friends WordPress plugin with its author Alex Kirk. A lot of interesting features, including a built in RSS reader and a WordPress to WordPress social network.

I had a couple of thoughts, I wonder if this would work on a WordPress multi-site like Glow Blogs?

I also wondered if importing all these posts you were reading would bloat your own blog? This was answered in the podcast, you can set the number of posts kept or the length of time to keep them.

Alex did mention the IndieWeb, so I am wondering if there is much integration, with webmentions or bookmarking for example.

Obviously to use the social part you need friends using the plugin, but I think I’ll install it somewhere to see how it works as an RSS reader when i have a mo.

 

Listened Michael Camilleri from Really Specific Stories
Join host and podcast studies researcher Martin Feld as he delves into stories of tech-podcast production and fandom, featuring creators and their listeners.

Listened: Really Specific Stories – Michael Camilleri, I continue to really enjoy this podcast. A podcast about podcasting and podcast listening.

Wonderfully it discusses the culture of podcasting rather than the type of mic you need. Michael‘s episode was very interesting his views on podcasting and the web had me nodding a lot.

I grabbed this wee snippet when I arrived in the car park at school the other day using Castro’s ability to snip a bit from a podcast (I am presuming such a short extract, for review, breaks no copyright).

There is a lot more to listen too, the idea of blogging, podcasting and writing html as a something done by ordinary folk, and the idea that the openness of the format invite participation certainly rings true for me.

There is quite a lot of blogging about blogging, maybe we need more podcasting about listening to podcasts & podcasting.