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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Some gems from my Pinboard this week

Featured image, my own gif, Source, public domain: Book on Swordsmanship and Wrestling.   found on europeana

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If you want your kids to have a solid computer science education, encourage them to go build something cool. Not by typing in pedantic command words in a programming environment, but by learning just enough about how that peculiar little blocky world inside their computer works to discover what they and their friends can make with it together.

We shouldn’t be teaching kids “computer science.” Instead, we should provide them plenty of structured opportunities to play with hardware and software. There’s a whole world waiting to be unlocked.

from: Jeff Atwood: Learning to code is overrated – NY Daily News

The article stems from the news that all New York City pupils will be coding in 10 years.  English education is away ahead of them: National curriculum in England: computing programmes of study – GOV.UK

The counter argument is that there are a lot of coding jobs in Scotland waiting for applicants:

Scotland’s tech sector is booming and our employment partners have existing vacancies just waiting to be filled by CodeClan graduates. Learn with CodeClan and become part of shaping the future of the digital world.

from: Home | Digital Skills Academy Scotland | CodeClan
and
Digital tech sector ‘to see strong growth in Scotland’.

This links very much to the views expressed by Charlie Love on Radio #EDUtalk: we have a lack of these skills in Scotland.

I do wonder how we can gear up for typing in pedantic command words in a programming environment with our current decline in computer science teaching. Should we go down the same road as England or would it be better to take Jeff Atwood’s advice? Is there a happy medium?

Image my own from a brief encounter with processing.

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It is National Poetry Day. When I was in class I always wanted to do something for this, but only occasionally remembered. Although I don’t have a way with words I like working with poetry in the class. I also occasionally like twitter haiku and the like.

I read Tom Woodward’s blog regularly and yesterday I noticed Fridge Poetry – Google Sheets as Database in my RSS reader. Given that I’ve messed about with fridges before 1, I took a look: Google Sheets – Fridge Poetry.

The really interesting thing 2 about this is that Tom has set it up so that it is easy to make another fridge with different sets of words. He even has a link on his post to create a copy of the google spreadsheet to make your own copy (you need a google account, a low entry bar). The sheet itself has the instructions.

Here is one with a selection of words from Scotland small? by Hugh MacDiarmid.

How do you save something like this? Take a screenshot.

What I really love about this idea, besides the sharing of how to do it, it the easy way it can be extended and used with a different set of words.

  1. That was back in 2002 when I was playing with Flash ↩
  2. The other interesting this is the JavaScript and php stuff.↩

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Saw this on DaringFireball.
DirectLinks – Canisbos is a Safari extension. Really useful for copying links from Google Search results. Update 6 Sep 2021: extension is gone, se DF for details, link now to archive. Ironic that the link goes to spam sites now.

Normally when you try and copy a link from a google search you get this sort of thing:
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCwQFjABahUKEwjq9YnOtOPHAhXxS9sKHUQDB-k&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFolktale&usg=AFQjCNHDEzwkM43l294OJ6AptxA7_Gg1pw&sig2=Lnf3ewVtFjbDOa7bl3SosA

As google wraps the link so that they can count clicks. Installing the DirectLinks extension means if I copy the same link I get:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folktale

Which is a lot more useful.  A quick google finds ways of doing this in Firefox and chrome too. I’ve not tested those.

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The blog I’ve enjoyed reading most this summer has been Clarence Fisher’s.

I’m still a believer that my default classroom tech set up: classroom blog, discussion boards, individual blogs, wikis, google docs and hangouts, flickr, skype, and a few random pieces of production software (audacity, etc) does more to give kids a voice, to connect them with people on the other side of the globe who have new ideas for them to evaluate, than 90% of the VC dollars out there have done with the latest apps.

The First 100 Years of Web Design 1

Is just one quote but I think anyone interested in using ICT in learning and teaching would get a lot from reading over his recent posts.

A Challenging Tweet is a great way of looking at and thinking about tech in schools overall.

This fitted with Second Life college campuses: A tour of abandoned worlds which I found via Stephen Downes

Clarence’s choices of tech to use parallels my own although I never could use some of these in the class due to blockages. The thing that strikes me about these choices: blogs, wikis, communications in general, is that they need some sort of long term care. One blog post will not a lot for your class or a learner. A series where they connect with another school across the world just might. This make this harder than grabbing an iPad and using a drill and practise app (I know easy target).

I am saying care rather than planning because a lot of goodness my classes got from blogs was serendipitous it could not be planned for. This takes me to:

The same sort of blind process happened in another series of experiments where Stanley and Joel Lehman instructed robots to work toward defined objectives. In one experiment a bipedal robot programmed to walk farther and farther actually ended up walking less far than one that simply was programmed to do something novel again and again, Stanley writes. Falling on the ground and flailing your legs doesn’t look much like walking, but it’s a good way to learn to oscillate, and oscillation is the most effective motion for walking. If you lock your objectives strictly on walking, you won’t hit that oscillation stepping stone. Stanley calls this the “objective paradox” — as soon as you create an objective, you ruin your ability to reach it.

from Stop Trying To Be Creative | FiveThirtyEight

Which sort of relate to my conversation with Charlie Love yesterday evening on Radio EDUtalk 2, where he talked about following learning interest in teaching coding in a creative way.

Charlie’s post Minecraft: A celebration of learning at #Minecon2015 about Minecraft if my final piece of envy for this post.

 

1. ↩
the linked post Web Design – The First 100 Years is great too.

2. ↩ Radio #EDUtalk 19-08-2015 Charlie Love

Featured Image giotto-envy on Flickr Public Domain.

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I’m not on holiday at the moment but taking the odd day off over the summer. Yesterday was one. I found a good set of amusing links, here are a few.

The New Devil’s Dictionary From The Verge updates Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary.

Examples:

blogger (n.): An invasive species with no natural predators.

GIF (n.): Many prefer to pronounce this word “GIF,” instead of the more controversial-sounding “GIF.”

music (n.): An art form whose medium is copyright law.

And so on.

This reminded me to google for an english translation of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, hoping as usual for a creative commons version that could be played with. As usual I didn’t find that but got In Place of Thought – The New Yorker by Teju Cole which adapts the idea for modern times:

COFFEE. Declare that it is intolerable at Starbucks. Buy it at Starbucks. EVOLUTION. Only a theory. FASCISM. Always preceded by “creeping.” FEMINISTS. Wonderful, in theory. FISH. A vegetable.

Ouch, that last one stung!

Bonus Twitter mashup

Checking Teju Cole (@tejucole) on Twitter as his ideas started as tweets, I found:

  1. He seems to have abandoned twitter and
  2. The Time of the Game, a synchronized global view of the World Cup final. Just the sort of thing I like on the web, except for the football element.

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Pano from Beinn Bhreac

Here are a great series of articles that I came across this morning. I’d recommend everyone interested in the Internet and education to read them.

For someone who reads a lot online I do not dip into TES often. So I was excited to find:
Jim Knight: ‘Let’s give all students their own domain name – and watch the digital learning that follows’ today.

Ironically I got it via Jim Groom’s post:
Domains and the Cost of Innovation. I do read Jim’s blog religiously.

Jim Knight’s article is based on another wonderful post by Audrey Watters> Audrey writes about the work of Jim Groom and others at the University of Mary Washington: The Web We Need to Give Students.

I’ve been muttering and mumbling about this idea for a good while now, based on reading about the UMW project and taking part in DS106. I really hope that the TES article gives the idea some legs and it can get some traction in the UK and more importantly, to me, in Scotland.

Before I started working on the Glow team, I included it in a post, Glow should be at the trailing edge?. I don’t think the idea has ever been given serious consideration at the right level. It certainly goes is a slightly different direction than Glow is going but it is still worth considering.

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  • Homework is a Social Justice Issue – Hybrid Pedagogy

    While schools can provide low-income students with warmth, food, supplies, and a knowledgeable teacher, asking students to bring essential work home with them may remove those pillars of support from their educational process. Further, making in-class work dependent on progress made at home invites that stress into the classroom and diminishes the positive effect of those support structures that the school has put in place.

    Powerful post especially as closing the gap is in the news today. Interesting criticism of flipped learning too.

  • Things I Take for Granted #287 – Grabbing Stuff from Web Form Drop Down Lists a really nice geeky post.
    I’ve often done similar with a combination of find & replace and multi line editing but this is so much neater (and geekier). Apart from anything else this feeds I need a computer with ‘proper’ apps as opposed to a phone/tablet sometimes. (This post is however pulled together multi app style on an iPad, pinbook and drafts). Read with the last link in this post. I’ve subscribed to Tony Hirst’s blog for years, much flies over my head. But I am ready, or nearly in the zone (ZPD) for this one.
  • Raspberry Pi Model B+ gets price cut to £16 (Wired UK) I am currently dipping. My toes back in the raspberry pi water tempted to buy a couple just in case.
  • speaking of raspberry pis I’ve just set up a Twitter bot on mine DailyCreateBot (@DailyCreateBot) which has been fun. I’ll be blogging more about this.
  • Want to Make Your Course ‘Gameful’? A Michigan Professor’s Tool Could Help – Wired Campus – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    The system lets students choose their own path through a course, selecting the assignments that interest and challenge them. At its heart is a tool, called the “grade predictor,” that helps to “manage some of the chaos” of such a personalized system. The grade predictor also helps students figure out what they need to do to reach the classroom goals they set for themselves.

    GradeCraft also aims to give students the ability to fail without detrimental consequences. There are many assignments to choose from, so any students who do poorly on one can find plenty of other tasks to redeem themselves. Instructors, meanwhile, can allow students to revise their work.

    Echoes of DS106 and Derek Robertson on failure here.

  • An Eye Opening Discussion

    I don’t live in a box. I know that teens and adults use different devices for different purposes. But I was still surprised by how unbalanced their responses were compared to what mine (and I suspect most other adults) would be.

    Some nice pupil produced diagrams about the devices they use. I wonder if we will miss the sort of skills pointed to in the second link in this post.

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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