Month: February 2013

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Coding john

Even though it was expected I was pretty dismayed when posterous announced that it was shutting down.

Last week I blogged about possible ways forward and as I did so a couple of possible solutions appeared:

  1. Posthaven is the safe place for all your posts forever from some of the development team at posterous a site that will incorporate the best of posterous for $5 a month with a promise to keep going.
  2. Then Tim Owens (timmmmyboy) on Twitter offered us a home at Hippie Hosting where ewe could use WordPress.

So I’ve reserved edutalk on www.posthaven.com for $5 as a possibility, but the temptation to play is too much:

The idea now is to test out WordPress and keep posthaven as a fallback or perhaps as a way of contributing. The rest of this post will briefly cover what I did last weekend to test a few things out and start developing the idea.

So far:

  • I downloaded my own posterous backup from ‘John’s posterous – I always did like sending email‘ and set up a new wordpress blog, After Posterous, to see how that would go.
    Mixed results, the posts and comments showed up, but I lost the nice galleries, I’d have to go through the 300+ posts and set up WP galleries by hand.
  • I installed wp on hippy hosting, I used the system there, can’t recall the name, to install wordpress and it was done in seconds. I’ve normally have done this using ftp. Slightly worrying that this is so easy.
  • I got a new domain as a place holder: http://www.edutalk.info while developing the new site.
  • I added the FeedWordPress plugin and set it up to auto import boos tagged edutalk. This worked really well. pulling in all the boos in the RSS feed very quickly and treating them well. Linking the audio and creating the enclosures for podcasting. I am delighted with this.
  • The boos are posted tagged audioboo, it looks like I might have to think about the formatting a little bit.
  • I downloaded the posterous back up for SLFtalk – Audio publishing by attendees at the Scottish Learning Festival to have a look at the format, it seems less daunting that the 2GB edutalk backup.
    I’ve now got something to worry about. For some reason posterous have decided that there backups don’t link audio properly:

    What about audio?
    The Posterous export file doesn’t currently provide links to audio files, so there’s not a way for us to import them automatically. If you have audio files, you’ll need to find them in the “audio” folder within the backup zip file and manually upload them to the relevant posts.


    from: Import from Posterous — Support — WordPress.com
    This is going to be tricky given the number of posts we have.

Thinking about

  • It looks like to get the posts with audio up I’ll have to do something automatic. I’d need to, say: parse the posterous backup, to extract information; identify associated audio files; upload the audio, probably by ftp; create the information needed for a post (including enclosure info) and create the post, probably with the MetaWebLogAPI. The problem will be that the posts will vary depending on the source, audioboo, email, directly through the web. Some posts have audio that was uploaded to posterous, some link to audioboo. I hope to cobble a solution to this with SuperCard, AppleScript and string.
  • I’ll try to get enclosures showing up in posts as audio players, hopefully html 5 with fall back for older browsers and ones that do not support mp3. I think I saw a snippet of php for that somewhere in the wordpress help.
  • I am wondering how the change from the test domain, edutalk.info to edutalk.info will go, will I have to fix all the urls for enclosures in the wordpress database? Anyone know if this is easy?
  • I’ve no idea how to handle submission via email. Posterous did a great job of this, especially dealing with different filetypes.

Luckily there is a couple of months to get this sorted…

image idea from here

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looking for doug
looking for doug

On Monday evening I joined Doug Belshaw’s etmooc session on Digital Literacies. It was an interesting session, Doug spoke mostly to his thesis What is ‘digital literacy’ and a lovely set of slides T3S1: Digital Literacies with Dr. Doug Belshaw. Doug has archived, video and audio on the Internet Archive. I’ve added my audio recording to the Unofficial ETMOOC RIPCast where I’c collected some of the sessions I’ve attended and some I’ve missed.

Doug took participants though some exercises in thinking about digital literacies working in a ether pad and in the blackboard session. I guess you needed a degree of digital literacy to keep up with it.

Like Doug I do not believe in the idea of a digital native but am fascinated by how folk learn to read and write (watch, create, listen to etc) using digital tech. I believe that I’ve a reasonable degree of web literacy .

This belief was challenged a bit as I watched folk start to define and redefine digital Literacies. It confirmed my suspicion that although I am somewhat digitally literate, I could not define what I mean by this. After the meet I still cannot. This reminds me of a quote, that I can’t quite recall or source, to the effect that a speaker of a language may not be able to make any true statement about that language.

Fun

One factor in, if not measuring digital literacy, is a indicator, is the ability to be able to have fun in the language. Make jokes, puns, poetry and be relaxed when using it.

Playing with John on Marratech

I recall, a few years ago(2007), a few Scottish Educators had join in using using Marritech for the first time. We were all, for that time, experienced users of ICT in the classroom , none of us knew what we were doing. All you could hear were gales of laughter as we explored the tools, whiteboard slides and the like making a ton of mistakes.
This feeling of relaxed fun was quite different from the experience of watch many teaching professional using ict. I am not sure how we move folk into this experience other than by modelling it when possible.

Web Literacies

Towards the end of the session Doug explained his current work focuses on the more manageable task of creating a standard for web literacy. Learning/WebLiteracyStandard – MozillaWiki.

This is very interesting stuff, and although I am sure that the grid Doug has produced, see Mozilla Web Literacies White Paper (v0.8) – Google Drive could be argued with it provides a great structure for thinking around the subject.

All in all this episode of #ETMOOC has got me thinking far more than I’ve time to organise in a blog post. I’d love to see helping pupils become confident webmakers become part of mainstream education.

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Woke up this morning to a barrage of tweets about Posterous turning off on April 30.

We use posterous for EDUtalk and I have a few other posterous blogs too.

This is not too unexpected, I bloged about it a couple of times, Posterous Worries and More Posterous Worries but it is still disappointing, who doesn’t like great stuff for free.

I’ve blogged enough about how good posterous is and the features that make it great for EDUtalk. I am going to make a list here of what is needed with some possible solutions and hopefully get some feedback.

  • Cost, posterous is free. I am not opposed to paying for stuff on the web, I pay for hosting here and elsewhere, the icecast part of Radio EDUtalk, flickr, pinboard and other stuff but we don’t want to pay too much for EDUtalk.
  • Space, last year at some point I downloaded everything from EDUtalk (There is a mac app for that) and it was well over 1GB then, there are >1000 posts. We need to move to a flexible hosting, or to use the Internet Archive for hosting our larger files.
  • Upload size, posterous allows upload of fairly large audio files through a browser. Other options may mean ftp, not a hugh problem but.
  • Media handling, folk can email in all sort of audio to edutalk and posterous deals with it and displays it nicely.
  • Open posting by email, I’ve not seen this else where, folk can email an audio file to EDUtalk and it is posted to the moderation queue, this makes for a very easy entry to podcasting, covering events by lots of folk easy, My favourite feature about posterous.
  • The Posterous API, recently broken, this allowed us easily to pull in audioBoos and ipadio phlogs. The MetaWeblogAPI or the FeedWordpress plugin (not sure how it handles attachments) would let us do this with WordPress.

From my knowledge and experience the simplest fit would be self hosted WordPress, ftp upload of Radio EDUtalk episodes (either to the sit or to the Internet Archive), forget the submission via email, or do this manually. Use the MetaWebLogAPI or FeedWordpress to bring in other content.

An Opportunity?

I’d like better, I’d love to keep all the features of EDUtalk and even get back the old phone in feature (that used to be handled by gabcast). I’ve also got some interest in using something else from the ubiquitous wordPress (ironic since I’ve spent a ton of time arguing for WP in Glow recently).

I wonder too how well the various WordPress posterous import solutions would handle our content, for example some of our ipadio and audioboos use the players from these sites, some use just a lonk that posterous turned into a posterous player and most recently we have been downloading and reposting the files to fix a feedburner/audioboo problem!

I’d love to hear some ideas of the best way to move this forward.

Update: just see this: Posthaven is the safe place for all your posts forever

When will Posthaven be able to do _______?

Everything you expected and liked about Posterous will eventually be in Posthaven. Things like post by email, multiple users, pages and links, full HTML theming, and the bookmarklet.

We’ll deploy the features and let you know as soon as they’re available.

from: Posthaven is the safe place for all your posts forever

I’ve reserved edutalk on www.posthaven.com for $5 as a possibility.

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As part of etmooc we are encouraged to use a variety of Storytelling tools. I’ve spent a fair bit of time over the last couple of days animating gifs but though it was time to step out of my comfort zone.

I decided to choose something from 50+Ways – Tools A to Z @cogdogs wiki of online storytelling tools.

My problem was twofold, I need to decide what tool to use and what story to tell. Time for avoidance tactics, a bit of light coding, to come up with a way to choose a way.

I ended up with Which Way? a simple page that will give you a randomised choice from the 50 Ways list.

Still without a story I decided to use one of the tools to explain what I’ve done, a couple of click gave me VoiceThread. I am not sure if it ois the best tool for this particular job but it is quick and simple to use, a bunch of screen shots and a mic.

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Sound the Alarm 1

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I’ve been MIA from etmooc for the past week or so, busy time at work, edutalk and life in general have conspired. I’ve been glancing at g+ and reading a fraction of the posts but that is about it.

Daunted from doing much thinking I decided to fall back on animating gifs, one of the tasks in topic 2. I am happy messing about with gifs so this is a restful activity.

Falling back on an old favourite I downloaded a clip from youtube of the opening sequence of Blade Runner.

I quickly grabbed a few very short sections of 9 frames each. Once I looked at them I though they would combine nicely.

blade runner intro

I did this in FireWorks CS3. Fireworks allows you to import gifs quickly and place them on a image. You need to place them in the right place first click so I put on place holder graphics with the same dimensions of my gifs to make it easy to line them up.

This turned out quite well. Caught some of the mood of the opening scene perhaps. I would have been better making a better quality version of the fan gif to avoid the banding. The eye could have done without the extra fireball on the last clip but I like the way it almost mirrors the ‘real’ fireball on the left.

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Open Source Edition of LiveCode by RunRev Ltd — Kickstarter

Reinventing HyperCard for the 21st Century. A free open source app creation platform for non-programmers and programmers alike.

I just backed this project on Kickstarter. It aims to take LiveCode open source. LiveCode is a x-platform clone of the old macheads favourite HyperCard.

HyperCard is the application that turned me into someone who disliked computers and regarded then an improved Banda machine (Banda, HyperCard, really showing my age) into an enthusiast. Folk with less tolerant spouses should step away from the likes of LiveCode.

I am not a current user of LiveCode, although I bough a license a year or so ago. I tend to use the mac only SuperCard. At one time I even made some educational shareware with HyperCard and then SuperCard. Didn’t make much money but had a lot of fun. Over the years I’ve knocked up tools to do various fun things (from Animating Gifs to logging kids onto glow), but the real strength of LiveCode may be in coding for pupils. RunRev, the company that produce LiveCode think so too:

We believe that computational thinking and programming is a key form of digital literacy and that enabling a new generation to write interactive software is critically important in today’s economy.

LiveCode is used in hundreds of schools around the world to teach programming in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) classes. It is uniquely suited for students in the 13 to 18 age groups. Every school that has used LiveCode for more than a year has seen a doubling of uptake in advanced computer science classes for boys and girls as well as an increase in exam pass rates!

I would imagine that the easy entry to programming that LiveCode provides (going on my HyperCard and Supercard experience here) would help get pupils that would not normally be interested in programming started while providing a accelerated development path for the code friendly ones.

Anyway I thought it worth a punt. RunRev are based in Edinburgh so a local company.

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A taster for the #EDUtakk recordings from the ACTS conference in Stirling 2 Feb 2013
Stirling, United Kingdom

This audio file was orginally posted to AudioBoo(m) with the mobile app. It has been downloaded and posted here since audioboom no longer supports free accounts.

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edutalk setup

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be invited to the Association of Chartered Teachers Scotland – conference.

A ton (scientifically measured) of teachers turned up to discuss education, on a beautiful Saturday, at the Stirling Management Centre.

As usual with these events the only problem is having to decide which sessions to go to.  

I broadcast and recorded both Keynotes, the first  Radio #EDUtalk Sir Tim Brighouse – is now on EDUtalk

There was a great buzz around the conference with a very positive feeling to the discussions. As well as recording the Keynotes and a couple of sessions I also grabbed a few folk for a chat about their particular interests and their impressions of the conference. It continues to delight me about how generous folk are if you ask them to share. There will some excellent listens on [Edutalk](http://edutalk.info/pages/radio-edutalk] over the next week or so as I get time to do some light editing.

The audio for the keynotes is better quality than my usual output due to the generosity of the professionals at the conference who not only gave me access to their audio but the necessary cable.

As a taste of what is to come here is a 25 second snippet of  David Cameron’s introduction to Sir Tim Brighouse’s keynote: