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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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.

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Whether explicitly stated or not, this is precisely what I see many folks advocating for with our students and educators alike. Telling kids to be careful and thoughtful in what they share is important. Telling them to be calculating and strategic is dangerous. It might be a good thing to consider if you’re selling soap but not if you’re a human being. I see people applying these principles being applied to the way they interact online. The things they share are strategic. They share content and ideas they know will get a lot of views/likes/retweets rather than things that are simply interesting to them. They are careful to maintain the desired reputation of their brand. The schedule their posts and content to get the most traffic and interaction. None of these things are inherently bad but when this criteria drives you, I think you’ve crossed the line from human to brand.

Source: If I Ever Think of Myself as a Brand, Slap Me | Ideas and Thoughts

Love this post from Dean Sharski, I think this is how I’ve subconsciously chosen to pay attention to folk. The more machine like they are the less likely I am to pay attention.

Hence my recent tweet:

I don’t particularly want to have professional twitter account. I do think about what I share and I don’t think I’ve ever posted anything that would scare the horses, but a fair proportion of my online life is nonsense. Some of this eventually feeds into my life as an educator but some might appear quite strange sometimes. I tend to post different things different places, this blog steers clear of ds106 related things, gifs go to tumblr but everything ends up on twitter in a messy stream.

 

Featured image: Tiger Brand on Flickr  No known copyright restrictions.

 

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One of my favourite blog post series, Tom Woodward‘s Weekly Web Harvest had a good haul this week including a link to this delightful twitter bot, moth generator (@mothgenerator). I took a few hours to get my moth but worth the wait.

The bot generates a moth image from the text you tweet it.

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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.