Category Archives: enviable stuff

Links/bookmarks/likes

Talking about it isn’t good enough / But quoting from it at least demonstrates / The virtue of an art that knows its mind. // Seamus Heaney : Squarings

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Liked Co-claiming and Gathering Together – Developing Read Write Collect by Aaron Davis (Read Write Respond)
A reflection on developing a site building upon the ideas of the #IndieWeb to bring together all my disparate pieces around the web in one place. Just when I thought I had enough sites, I decided to create another one. A feed that could be used in a platform like Micro.blog. My intent this time wa...

Aaron’s post give a lovely overview of how he is tackling the #indieweb in a thoughtful manner. I’ve been playing with some of the same ideas here in a less disciplined way. Like Aaron I hope this is the future.

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But there is something about an informal collection of independent blogs by people with a shared passion that makes for a much better micro-community experience than social networks or other online group platforms. I’ve experienced this first-hand with a couple of blogging communities I’ve participated in: an informal network of blogs by adoptive parents and the pen and paper enthusiast blog community.

Micro.blog and Micro-Communities

I’ve had a huge amount of learning and pleasure out of both tightly bound and loose knit online communities. Doug’s post shows how of a network of Blogs owned by individuals can be better than a silo and points out the need for hashtags or other connective tissue.

Micro blogs with webmentions one part of improving the online conversation. A method or methods for discovery and group participation would be another.

I can’t recommend micro.blog enough. It has really helped me think about my online activity in many new ways. You can get involved for free and lose nothing by joining and playing.

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Bookmarked

  • Teaching Students to Legally Use Images Online | Cult of PedagogyMight be a nice guide to copyright.

    OPTION 1: MAKE YOUR OWN If students create their own images, then they own the copyright and can use them without having to pay any money or get permission (unless the photos are of someone else…but we’ll get to that).

    I like option 1

  • BBC – KS3 Bitesize History – The First World War : Revision A bit too much detail for my primary pupils, but should be handy for me.
  • WWI Uncut – YouTube – YouTube WWI Uncut BBC series, short programmes. Medical one looks a bit to gory for my younger pupils.
  • World War 2 timeline by lindaayers – Teaching Resources – Tes

    This can be used either as a teaching aid to help with the chronology, or printed off and laminated as a display. I have it hanging on a washing line from my ceiling and the children refer to it quite regularly. Hope it’s useful.

  • E-safey knowledge organiser.docx I am starting to notice some of these knowledge organisers popping up.
  • S3 for Poets
    Might be useful if I ever want to use Amazon S3 storage.

    S3 stands for Simple Storage Service.

    It’s a service provided by Amazon that provides storage and it’s simple. If you look at it the right way. And it’s Tuesday. And there’s a full moon. 🙂

    Simple is in the eye of the beholder. And to a programmer, like me, S3 is simple. But we forget sometimes that what seems simple to us might not seem so simple to a literate person who isn’t a programmer. For example, a poet.

    But poets need to store stuff too, and Amazon provides a great service, so let’s dive in and crash through the obstacles and get to the other side, where storage is simple. Dave Winer, New York August 2012

Image from page 109 of “The manual training school, compri… | Flickr No known copyright restrictions. Somewhat glitched.

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Some of the things I’ve pinned to the board this week.

  • Home – Minetest

    A free, open source voxel game engine and game. Fully extendable. You are in control.

    I installed that on a few PCs in school. Testing it in a lunchtime club. Looks like a free minecraft. Lots of possibilities. I have it running on one pc as a server and the class can connect from different PCs (WE have tested and got it working on mac & windows).

  • Let’s Enhance

    Neural network hallucinates missing details to make image look natural.

    hallucinates is an interesting choice of words.

  • How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You’ve Ever Met

    Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections.

    Not sure if this is incredibly creepy, just the way things are heading or both.

  • That IoT Thing: Bitty Data Logger 3.0

    Bitty Data Logger is an application which can capture and chart data from a BBC micro:bit’s internal accelerometer, magnetometer and temperature sensors. It’s available for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets and for Chromebook as well. Data is, of course, transmitted from the micro:bit to your smartphone over Bluetooth so you can be some distance away from the micro:bit and…. whatever you have connected to it.

    I had a quick test with an earlier version. Lots of possibilities for the classroom, wonder when I’ll get it fitted in.

  • Something is wrong on the internet

    one of the traditional roles of branded content is that it is a trusted source. Whether it’s Peppa Pig on children’s TV or a Disney movie, whatever one’s feelings about the industrial model of entertainment production, they are carefully produced and monitored so that kids are essentially safe watching them, and can be trusted as such. This no longer applies when brand and content are disassociated by the platform, and so known and trusted content provides a seamless gateway to unverified and potentially harmful content.

    There seems to be a myriad of weird videos, automatically or semi-automatically created, earning money. Google have now said they will restrict videos that are flagged: YouTube to restrict ‘disturbing’ children’s videos, if flagged – BBC News. It seems unlikely that will deal with the problem.

Featured image, a bit of processing slit-scanning strangness, guess the source.

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Bookmarked A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll) (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)
The humble blogroll is long overdue for some updates in form and functionality on the open web.

Chris is rebooting the blogroll idea. I used to have one but it got lost when I moved from pivot to WordPress. We held on to the links in GlowBlogs. The idea of giving the blogroll more importance is attractive, but would bring a deal of maintenance with it.

It is always good to be reminded about OPML, I’ve found Chris’s indieWeb one useful as well as Aaron’s Feeds. I subscribe to both in inoreader, so when they add a feed I do too.

Is there a worry that the already depreciated Links Manager feature in WordPress will go away altogether? I think I recall discussing this with the developers working on Glow Blogs and the links technology in WordPress is old and doesn’t really fit with the way WordPress is developed now.

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Grist from the pinboard.

  • Creativity and digital technology So the digital is a less creative arena?

    Gardner and Davis suggested that the pre-packaged resources (no matter how vast) made available to young people through the Internet is limiting exercise of the imagination because (as Marvel has shown again and again) it is easier to repackage an existing idea than come up with a new one

  • A Selection of micro:bit Projects – Maker Space

    A lot of these projects involve connecting the micro:bit to other bits and pieces; such as buzzers, or LEDs. However, we start off with a really simple project which just uses the micro:bit on its own

  • The Case Against Automated Student Data Dashboards | EdSurge News

    We tried to inspire reflection, but it often happened separate from learning. At the end of the semester, we’d ask students about their strengths and weaknesses, and what they could do differently next semester. They would write down a few ideas, but were never asked to come back to them. It became an activity that yielded little impact.

  • Teachable Machine silly practical machine learning. Would be a good demo.
  • Educators in Indieweb twitter list Thanks to indiewebber Chris Aldrich for a interesting slice of educators on twitter.
  • Analyze | Webbkoll – dataskydd.net

    This tool helps you check what data-protecting measures a site has taken to help you exercise control over your privacy. Read more.

    One of the many links from the next one.

  • Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web – Neustadt.fr

    We’re quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.

    Lots of information and links clearly spelt out. Tempted to quote all of it, but just one more.

    Pay for services and content that you like, if you are able. If you like reading The Guardian, for example, consider subscribing. If your favourite YouTube channel is on Patreon, consider pledging a small amount per video. If you like services like Pinboard.in that charge in return for a useful service, buy it. There’s mutual respect when both the user and the service provider know what basic service they are buying/selling.

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Liked IndieWeb: The Book (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)
For a quite a while I’ve been thinking about writing a book about the IndieWeb to provide a broader overview of what it is philosophically, how it works, how its community functions, and most specifically how the average person can more easily become a part of it.

This should be very useful. I’ve been trying various indieweb things for a while, but still find it tricky to understand and implement some of the technologies. There is a great wiki, but I think I am more likely to read through a book.