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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This is a experiment, I’ve generated a list of my recent (last 6 weeks) Pinboard: bookmarks tagged ‘facebook’ and post them below.

This will hopefully be a useful reference for me and perhaps others.

I’ve been thinking about Facebook quite a bit recently. I still only visit occasionally and feel fairly negative about it. When I do visit I often see interesting things about folk I know, but not enough to make me visit more often. I also recognise that it can be used for really interesting projects for example the EAST Project we talked about on on Radio #EDUtalk.

The video, linked to by Alan, held my attention for the full hour (I find it hard to watch online videos for more than a few minutes).

The Featured Images is Soild links | SONY DSC | Bernard Spragg. NZ | Flickr used under a public domain license. Stamped with the stamped attributor version of flickr cc attribution bookmarklet maker.

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Yesterday I tweeted a link to a great post, the transcript of a talk about some social aspects of technology and how allowing technologist to lead our progress might have negative impacts on our privacy and lives, here is a quote.

Those who benefit from the death of privacy attempt to frame our subjugation in terms of freedom, just like early factory owners talked about the sanctity of contract law. They insisted that a worker should have the right to agree to anything, from sixteen-hour days to unsafe working conditions, as if factory owners and workers were on an equal footing.

Companies that perform surveillance are attempting the same mental trick. They assert that we freely share our data in return for valuable services. But opting out of surveillance capitalism is like opting out of electricity, or cooked foods—you are free to do it in theory. In practice, it will upend your life.

Remarks at the SASE Panel On The Moral Economy of Tech

This spoke very much to some thoughts I’ve been having about our relationship to technology companies. Some of these were sparked  by Dean Groom, Why not to buy Minecraft Education Edition.  Some more idaea were discussed at the Always on (them) event at the University of the West of Scotland and I am in the midst of exploring those in a few microcasts, tagged DigitalUWS & microcast (one down a few more to go).

I’ve not come to any great conclusions but I do think it is something we should be thinking a lot harder about.

More grist arrived today from Stephen Downes:

I can see how the presentation would engage school leaders looking for a way to address current trends in learning, but they need to look beyond the single-vendor approach proposed here, and they should be clear that technology companies are service providers who are held accountable for delivery, not partners taking a hand in pedagogical and educational decisions.

Looking back to move forward: A process for whole-school transformation ~ Stephen Downes

I know myself enough to recognise that I am somewhat enthralled by technology and software. I certainly need to think about my relationship, on so many levels, with the technology I use. Should we be addressing this in the classroom with our pupils?

featured image is probably walking a copyright tightrope, but seems appropriate

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When we talk personalization, we tend to talk about targeting. You learn a certain set of things, you get tested, the personalization software finds knowledge gaps and runs you through the set of canned explanations that you need.

And

While not entirely useless, this conception doesn’t fit the bulk of my experience as either a teacher or a learner. In my experience, students often have very similar skill gaps, but the remedy for each student may be radically different.

from We Have Personalization Backwards

I though this was a brilliant post. To me it reinforces that the best online learning involves contact with real people in real ways (still #ds106). I’ve stuck with online learning when there is more conversation than automation. This may change if the ‘real personalisation’ comes to online systems.

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For example, teaching digital skills would include showing students how to download images from the Internet and insert them into PowerPoint slides or webpages. Digital literacy would focus on helping students choose appropriate images, recognize copyright licensing, and cite or get permissions, in addition to reminding students to use alternative text for images to support those with visual disabilities.

Really interesting post by Maha Bali with some great real world examples.

Knowing the Difference Between Digital Skills and Digital Literacies, and Teaching Both

So often we only seem to have time for breezing through the skills and mentioning literacy. In my own work we deliver fewer and fewer daytime CPD opportunities, shorter twilights are delivered more often. Skills then become the main focus.

I’d be interested in knowing how much penetration digital literacy has in classrooms across Scotland?

Especially among staff who do not identify themselves as having digital skills?

An even more challenging read is: Media Literacy: 5 key concepts to teach this year

I am yet to see Microsoft or MinecraftEdu act in a way other than marketing and brand-building (ie scholarly).

and

Most media messages are organized to gain profit and/or power.
To learn this, kids need to be removed from the kind of dubious activity that ‘brands’ are doing to children with the willing co-operation of teachers. Point 5 – The message that goes with the device you place in the child’s hand was not created, designed or sold to make them more literate – and yet, we call it ‘digital literacy’ to mask the obvious effect of forcing one brand over another into kids education.

I’d like to see this discussed by a group of teachers who belong to different clubs, ADEs, MIEExperts, Google for Education Certified Innovators and the like. How do we deal with our bias when teaching? Do we walk the talk if we claim some sort of balancing act?

The featured image for this post is Public Domain: Image from page 108 of “Argument to errors of thought in science, religion and social life” (1911) | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

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I quite often read above my understanding age, which is why Hapgood is in my RSS feeds. The other day I read: Connected Copies where I read this:

the future of the web involves moving away from the idea of centralized, authoritative locations and into something I call “connected copies”.

This lead me to AMBER where it says:

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society wants to keep linked content accessible.

Whether links fail because of DDoS attacks, censorship, or just plain old link rot, reliably accessing linked content is a problem for Internet users everywhere.

Having blogged for a while I am very aware of this problem, links I’ve made have fallen away. My bookmarks are full of holes.

Just the other day I linked to a couple of posts here that were made this month. They have already gone.1

Preserve Links Now. The plugin added this to my post editor.
Preserve Links Now. The plugin added this to my post editor.

I’ve installed the Amber WordPress Plugin here and set it to use the Internet Archive to ‘save links’ when I make them. I could have chosen to save them here, but I wonder if that could get messy?

The other thing that crosses my mind is what if people want to rub out something they have published. When a post is taken down deliberately, should I be archiving it?  The posts I mentioned above were deleted by the author (I presume). Should I then make public copies available?  That is what would have happened if I’d had the amber plugin working at the time.

I don’t know the answer to these questions or how the plugin works, but I’ll keep it running here for a while and look out for broken links.

After hitting the button
After hitting the button I get a list of links preserved. Presumably on the Internet Archive.

 

Featured image Flickr photo Public Domain: Image from page 28 of “The effect of black rot on turnips, a series of photomicrographs, accompanied by an explanatory text” (1903) | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

1. These links were to posts Dean Groom made about Microsoft acquiring Minecraft EDU. Strangely they have persisted in my RSS reader. I’d recommend a more recent one that is still there: Media Literacy: 5 key concepts to teach this year | Playable ↩

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  • I spend a couple of days at BETT this year and saw some interesting things, here are my bookmarks for johnjohnston tagged ‘bett2016’Of course I missed far too much stuff and too many people.
  • I did meet Oliver Quinlan and got a couple of Raspberry Pi tips. Seems it should be possible to set up a pi to scan for several WiFi networks and auto join a suitable one. You can also run a pi from a usb drive as opposed to an SD card (as I understand it you still need to start from the SD but point to a system on the USB). There was another tip from Oliver that is just out of memory at the moment hovering round the tip of my tongue. I hope Oliver will be a guest on Radio Edutalk this year.
  • I saw the pi-topCEED and ordered one. there are 2 pi-tops. One a laptop and the other a ‘desktop’. I was going to buy another pi and always struggle for a screen to attach so this looked like an interesting idea. They were pretty flimsy but I think I’d mostly use them to set up a pi which then I would shell onto from an iPad or computer.
  • Alan O’Donohoe was running a pretty wacky stand for Exa Education I watched his highly mobile presentation teaching 2 + 2 in python. An extremely rigorous approach to teaching hidden in an entertainment sandwich. I learned a lot more than the answer (4 mostly).
  • I had a quick chat to Leon on the Exa stall too, as usual he is involved in fascinating stuff.
  • One of the big things everyone was talking about was Microsoft acquiring MinecraftEdu. Microsoft are pretty upbeat about this. Other reports mention some possible problems. My immediate thoughts were that this might become part of Glow since a fair slice of Glow is made up of O365.
  • Today I read a few posts by Dean Groom, pushing back against this minecraft development:

    As I said yesterday, I believe at this point, this is nothing more than another attempt by a technology giant to use ‘teacher frontage’ to mask it’s commercial agenda and make money. It’s also disgusting to think that the sell out of Minecraft Edu, which has used the IP and social capital of the broader community as well as teachers is being reaped in this way — and brazenly makes several claims and thin associations about ‘game changing’ learning, without any evidence whatsoever.

    from: Buy me: I’m great for learning | Playable and associated posts (Put down the bat Dean sums it up). I’ve not got any real experience of Minecraft, but have seen nice stuff carried out in the classroom and talked with Derek Robertson about MinecraftOTW on Radio EDUtalk. It will be interesting to see which way this goes. Some interesting, robust commentary on the Sorry, kids. Microsoft is turning Minecraft into an ‘educational tool’ • The Register Forums

  • I think Do it Kits | Make it, learn it, do it. was my favourite thing at BETT, the site is not really doing much of a job at describing the kit yet, but on on display used a Raspberry Pi to monitor a small mushroom farm.
  • I did think of staying an extra day to go to TeachMeet at BETT, but had been put off by, expense and the reports I’d read about some folk skipping the draw to present at previous editions. This tweet suggests things have improved:

  • Hopefully these were followed on the night.

Bonus link the CC0 image at the top of this post is from FindA.Photo which looks like a useful service that searches across a few other sites. Fré Sonneveld
 viaUnsplash

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From my Pinboard

  • Tips for Screencasting – BrettTerpstra.com I’ve been doing a fair bit of screencasting for Glow Blogs Help over the last while. I am very much a quick & dirty screencaster, one take and light editing. These are a great set of tips for getting better screencasts. The tips are universal but Brett uses ScreenFlow which is my favourite screencasting tool too.
  • Big Schools’ Birdwatch

    Join in with our survey from 4 January-12 February 2016. Count birds with your class and tell us what you see. We’ll send you a free ID poster!

    Looks like this could be a nice classroom/plaground activity to start the year with.

  • Create cognitive plugins for Minecraft with Bluemix, Docker, and Watson ~ Stephen Downes

    So here’s the concept: you can put the intelligence of a large artificial intelligence like IBM’s Watson into characters or objects that inhabit a virtual world like Minecraft. This is not theory; this 4-part tutorial provides detailed instructions on how to do exactly that.

    Quite mindblowing!

Featured image, public domain: Minimalist Chain | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

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There is a lot of it about, a lot of find out about. short term I don’t think this will have any effect on Glow Blogs, long term who know. Here are some things I’ve been reading.