Month: May 2014

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The Internet With A Human Face – Beyond Tellerrand 2014 Conference Talk

The first thing to centralize was search. Google found a superior way to index our web, and the other search engines faded away. Then Google acquired the one true ad network, and wrote the dominant analytics suite.

Email centralized in the face of rampant spam, with attractive offers of free storage to sweeten the deal.

Facebook won the social network wars in the US, and began gobbling up competitors in other countries.

The mobile devices that are taking over the web fall into one of two camps. One of them pretends to be more open than the other, but it’s mostly a matter of marketing. In practice they both have complete control of their ecosystem.

I tumbled and tweeted another quote from this presentation yesterday. You could easily quote the words that go with every slide. I’d highly recommend reading this if you are at all interested in the internet, privacy and information.

I am coming back to it today thinking that the awareness of your online presence, the data trails you leave and the consequences should sit squarely with internet safety in schools.

Maciej Ceglowski the presenter, run the wonderful Pinboard bookmarking service. He is also a painter who has painted in Scotland.

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A quick test

I am posting this from the editorial an interesting iOS app.

Editorial is a plain text editor for the iPad with powerful automation tools and a beautiful inline preview for writing Markdown

I've only made a few quick tests with the app but it looks like it will be of interest with folk who like scripting. Editorial has a python based automation system with which users can use and build workflows. You edit these workflow in the app itself.

Although I know no python I managed to edit the publish to metaweblogapi workflow to work with this pivotx blog. I also managed to import and configure the FTP image upload script

I am writing this post in markdown and hoping my blog understands it or that the publish script converts to html first. Update I needed to add conver to html to the workflow. This was simple.

It looks like there are plenty of workflows to install and much for the tinkerer to play with.

My own use of the iPad has changed over time and I am not sure this is for me. I mainly use my iPad for browsing, reading RSS (and posting findings to tumblr & twitter), social media, note taking , email and some light image and video editing. I've a few workflow type things that I do in Drafts but that is about it. I'll probably poke around in Editorial and see how it goes. I guess you can't have enough choice in ways to post to a blog.

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I’ve written here about FeedWordPress quite a few times and if you have spoken to me about technology for learning I’ve probably mentioned it to you too. FeedWordPress is a WordPress plugin that lets you aggregate, on the one blog, many blogs (or other sources that provide RSS).

FeedWordPress is used extensively on DS106 (Which I probably talk about far to much for my co-workers comfort) and we now use it on ScotEduBlogs to aggregate over 100 Scottish educational blogs.

I’ve posted about how I think this would be a great tool for learning in schools, allowing pupils to work in there own spaces but pull project related content from multiple sources together.

I’ve just found a wonderful example of this in use (somewhat more interesting than ScotEdublogs and easier to grasp than ds106)

This site allows 20 students to record botanical findings, they do so by posting to their own blogs. The results are aggregated on to Field Botany | Plants of the James River Park System, There are already 700 posts.

Belle Isle

The students can post photos and informatino straight to their blogs with mobile phones while in the field.

Tom Woodward on who’s blog I discovered this site explains the details:

This early days for the site but in the end the intrepid biology duo of Jill Reid and Dianne Jennings will worked with their students to create a site that local residents can use to identify plants in our James River Park System.

Tom goes onto explain how he set the site up and the plugins used.

Glow Blogs

One of the problems with suggesting FeedWordPress for learning is that it requires a fair bit of work to get going, you cannot use it on WordPress.com, edublogs or other sites that host blogs for you, you need to set up your own hosting and add and configure the plugin. As we work our way through requirements and procurement of the new blogging solution for glow the possibility of being able to offer this sort of factuality is very exciting…

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I’ve been keeping half an eye on the digital commonwealth project since talking to David on Edutalk. Last weekend I was doing a little blogging about the project and taking a short walk or two. One of the many attractive aspects of the project is that it invites people to think about the word and concept of commonwealth. Coincidently I read, not for the first time, a newish sign on the path to Loch Humphrey.

Commonwealth

This is an area I’ve started to really enjoy over the last few years. I feel it fits very well with my idea of commonwealth.

The start of the walk, by the gasworks, is about 15 minutes drive from Glasgow, and near public transport. It is popular, runners, mountain bikers, power walkers, ramblers of all shapes and sizes are there early to late. There is a fairly well graded track to the Loch if you need to keep your feet dry, or you can zig-zag the fields and moor. You will usually see a few wild flowers and the odd bit of wild life if you keep your eyes open. Once you are past the first hill the traffic noise stops. Out beyond the Loch it feels surprisingly isolated if you are early enough.

This seems to me to be a precious resource and although owned by farmers and the forestry commission (I guess), it feels as if some of the experience is part of our common wealth.

Mapping The Commonwealth

Over the years I’ve made efforts to record walks in various ways, posterous, fargo, and lots of map mashups. Recently I’ve had another go at this, this time trying to really simplify the workflow. I’ve ended up with a html template that uses a kml file produced by the Trails iPhone app and a flickr set. So to produce a page like this: Duncolm Mostly Floral I:

  1. Take a walk, record the track with trails, take some pictures.
  2. Stick the kml file in a folder in dropbox.
  3. Upload the photos to a new flickr set.
  4. Duplicate an html file, change the url of the kml file and the id of the flickr set.
  5. Write a couple of lines on notes in the html file.

I think this could be improved as a workflow with some sort of simple template. This would contain on separate line: A title; the flickr set’s id; the kml file and the notes.

Walk map

I’ve been fascinated with sort of recording/notetalking/storytelling for a fair while now and it is sort of my unofficial ‘digital commonwealth’.

I continue to see that this sort of activity could be great fun in class and there many ways to mash up maps, words and images. Wouldn’t it be great if the new glow blog solution had a Geo-Rss plugin for fold to activate.

I’d recommend showing the digital commonwealth to your class, whatever age and stage and at least borrowing some of the ideas for using digital media, if you do not join in. If you do want to join in I believe there are still places for a few more schools to receive some support.

David tell me there is still room for a few more schools and you can get in touch via email or twitter: DigCW2014. They are particularly need schools in Borders, Angus, Perth & Kinross, W Lothian, Clackmannan, Stirling, W Dunbartonshire, East Ren, Renfrewshire.

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A while back on Radio Edutalk I had the pleasure of talking to David McGillivray about the Digital Commonwealth 1. It is a pretty exciting project:

The ambition of the Digital Commonwealth project is to enhance the capacity of individuals and groups to use freely available mobile digital (and social) media tools and techniques to ensure their voices are heard in a saturated (and often commercially) motivated media landscape. The Digital Commonwealth project focuses on lowering the threshold for involvement for individuals and groups so that they can be empowered to exploit creative tools and technologies to tell their stories, digitally. The project reaches out to individuals and groups experiencing social, cultural or economic marginalization, whether related to age, ethnicity, poverty, disability or social isolation.

Digital Commonwealth

Since then I’ve heard that there are now 60 schools involved with the project along side a host of other community groups. The twitter stream is filled with delight: Twitter / Search – #digCW2014.

David tell me there is still room for a few more schools and you can get in touch via email or twitter: Digital Commonwealth (DigCW2014) on Twitter. They are particularly looking for:

Some highlights of the project include:

You can find out more about the projects on the Digital Commonwealth site fascinating to see social media being used across sectors.

1. Radio #EDUtalk 11-9-2013: David McGillivray | EDUtalk ↩

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First published on Fargo moved here 22 Jul 2019

With Dorothy, the weather forecast said 11 Centigrade, but it turned out to be 8, a cold May, grey sky, cold breeze.
The Blackthorn is out, and plenty of primrose around the wee burns on the slope.
Blackthorn
A fairly quite afternoon for a popular walk. We spent some time zigzagging through the trees.
On the way down a Raven gave us a good show of flying without flapping, soaring on the updraft.
Wind tree