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Pick a colour for the day. Notice it anywhere you go. Take photos. Pick the best one to show us. Did you notice that setting an intention to notice something, helped you pay attention and be more aware of your surroundings?

Thursday was a lovely day a bit of frost and a clear sky. unfortunately I was stuck indoors all day. I thought I’d wait till the weekend.

As atonement for not doing it on the right day I decided on yellow as I thought that would be hard.

Saturday started a dreach damp day sleet, rain and wet snow. I still managed to find plenty of yellow.

I love these simple challenges best of all this morning yellow shone out like lights. I didn’t even take gave of the opportunities.

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I had a late afternoon walk around the moot by the Slack’s trig point.

Heavy low cloud and a bit of a breeze.

Autumn is underway, rosehips and hawthorn red.

Blackberries starting to ripening.

Rosebay willowherb and thistles in seed.

The bracken and ferns rusting.

A couple of ravens, one jinxing nicely. I put up a  brace of grouse and heard one go-back-ing. A glimpse of a peregrine.

The rain stayed off and as usual I am delighted, just 15 minutes drive from home in Glasgow.

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View from Ben Chaluim. Green hills and a cloudy sky.

My wish, my encouragement is just taking these ten second breaks. OK. You know. You know I can’t carve out a regular meditation practice every day and every morning, but ten seconds? Can you carve out ten seconds? And just do it, you know. You know when you’re going to work or something, you come
downstairs and you go to open the door. You stop. Particularly in doorways and other thresholds where the tendency is to rush through… what is happening to my feet, shoulders back, ten seconds, breathing out. Where am I? How am I? Where am I going? There does not even really have to be an answer, it’s just this touching the earth. Touching the earth.

Ajahn Sucitto

I guess this exercise is supposed to help with a busy working life, I tried it today far from work off in the hills.

Often when walking alone in the quite of the hills, I think over work, wonder about ideas, remember past sadness and even tell my self stories about walking.

This exercise, seems to physically open my view, expand the horizons and create quiet.

The sensation fades pretty quickly too but I’ll repeat the exercise in different places and see what happens. If it works when I am puffing up a slope it might work in the middle of town or work.

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I’ve been taking a day a week off work this summer to go hillwalking. Yesterday I didn’t really feel great so decided to give it a miss. After a morning looking at screens I changed my mind and though to go for a short walk in the Kilpatrick hills.

 

This is 15 minutes drive from where I live, just about countryside and no more, but a great place for a walk.

There is a metalled road all the way to Loch Humphrey from Old Kilpatrick closed to traffic. It is a favourite walk for lots of folks.

I’d not been for a couple of weeks setting off from the Gas Works things had changed, the hedge had a Presbyterian short back and sides, brambles are is flower and meadowsweet was blooming.

Up the path I usual cut up a field leaving the road, today the grass had shot up to about a foot and a half high wild flowers everywhere:

The lesser spotted orchids, mostly gone, but there was:

Buttercups, hawksbeard, bedstraw, selfheal, clover, eyebright and lots more. Ringlet and Small Heath butterflies all over the place. I spent a while trying to catch slo-mo videos on my phone. I wonder if a selfie-stick would help?

Through the few trees and the edge of the moor is fringed with purple from the bell heather, lots of Tormentil too. Once on the moor common heather took over, not in flower yet, but there were patches of purple, yellow and white from the bell, bedstraw and tormentil everywhere.Â

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I’ve been finding camera+ on the phone pretty good for ‘macro’ photos.Â

sexton beetle

 

I was hoping to see some ravens or even a peregrine. Ravens are common and I’ve seem a few peregrines recently, one close in hot pursuit of a kestrel. Caught a quick glimpse of ravens and heard some nice croaking but no peregrines. I did see a nice kestrel hovering at my eye level.

Slacks Trig Point

I usually rejoin the Loch Humphrey path but today went round the moor to the Slacks trig point, before heading back down. Away from the road I didn’t meet anyone else, a beautiful couple of hours.

 

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Glow Cast is a new podcast. Just one episode so far.

As you would imagine it is a podcast about Glow. The idea is to keep the episodes short and fairly casual. The more important function is to demonstrate how easy it s to podcast and provide some resources for would be podcasters.

Glow Blogs now provide a very good podcasting platform. The increase upload file size will ensure that reasonable length podcasts can be published with ease.

I’ve long believed that podcasting is a very underused technology in the classroom. It can be a very motivating tool that can touch on any area of the curriculum as well as hitting multiple literacy experiences. Podcasting can provide great opportunities for projects and collaborative learning. In the past it was quite difficult technically but now it is very simple indeed.

**If you are thinking of dipping your toes into podcasting but are unsure of the first steps check out Glow Cast the resources are only beginning to to build.

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Enokson_-_CC-2

From Pinboard: bookmarks for johnjohnston for the most part.

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One of the things I love about open education in general, and open educational resources in particular, is the creative potential they offer to find, use, reuse, create and recreate such a wealth of diverse content and resources.

Lorna Campbell: Creativity, serendipity and open content | Open World

The post has some lovely examples of sources of surprising  stuff, great rabbit hole links to dive into. Most of the sources could easily be used to inspire some digital creativity, storytelling or practise using media tools. Or just for a little silliness!


Tit-Bits – digitalvictorianist.com