Category Archives: enviable stuff

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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ChromeStead is a really interesting blog from Guy Shearer who is head of IT and data at David Ross Eduction Trust, which I think is a private school.

From the title you would think it was all Google and chromebooks but the schools seems to use a mix of Google Apps, O365 and other products. This makes an enjoyable change from blogs from the PoV of one company supporter or another. The idea of using a mix is very appealing. The school has single sign on for both services, which I believe is possible using RM unify now.

Also from From a Glow perspective there are a lot of interesting posts about O365. Here is an example aside.

(I just wish someone at Microsoft could forget to invite the Sharepoint team to the next planning day so that they can come up with a Classroom competitor that works cleanly and simply like Sway).
ChromeStead: Sway: presentations reimagined, and some general thoughts on O365

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Top / Featured Image: A mashup of many random Monopoly game parts found on The Google (images search). Most were not openly licensed, and I freely admit taking them to remix into something new and commercially unviable. I am so guilty of theft. But at some point we have to ask about the idea of digital ownership of parts of popular culture used in a manner of open expression.

This is the note on the featured image on Alan’s post. As I start to try and get my head round explaining copyright to pupils it is a nice reminder of how complex the whole thing is. Alan, credits carefully all of the images he uses as featured images. Something I’ve started to try and do myself.

When talking pupils I find my self tending to stick closer to the law that I would do myself. I am pretty careful to attribute and use images that are legal, but occasionally will take a gif from a movie, especially in ds106 land.

The featured image in this post is public domain from Image from page 283 of “The expression of the emotions in man and animals” (1872). I though expressions for confusion and puzzlement worked with my feeling about copyright.

The link on the post should point to Alan’s original blog, I am hoping this is a useful way of link blogging, it may cause a bit of confusion if you click the link that will be tweeted.

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In regards to sharing openly, Doug Belshaw recommend s creating a canonical URL. The intent is to provide a starting point for people to engage with and build upon your work and ideas. This could be one space in which to share everything or you could have a separate link for each project. What matters is that it is public.

 

Arron Davis on the importance of sharing and linking.

As well as being a great link this is a test post, pulling in content from my pinboard links with FeedWordPress and saving them as a pending post, with the custom format of pinboard. The posts are marked as pending, allowing me to mark up the quote and add some text. 

The title of the post should link to Arron’s blog rather than mine. I hope there is a nice wee pinboard icon on the left.

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Dean Groom on Poekemon Go:

Teachers should care about Pokémon Go! – after from the initial network effects (craze) as it is a good way for kids to develop socially. It isn’t designed for education and certainly presents the all too common accessibility issues of commercial games – but THIS game leads you to start thinking about why games, play and learning are important – and how they can be connected with helping children deal with saturated media cultures – Great!

from: Should teachers care about Pokémon Go? | Playable

There is a lot more to think about in that post.

As usual with games, my mind wander and my eyes glaze, I’ve never caught the game bug (although I am interested when I read something like the above).

My first though was it is a wee bit like golf, a good walk spoiled. I am now wondering if some of my own behaviour fits the pattern.

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  1. I wander about outside, searching, looking at the map on my phone
  2. I capture images
  3. Share and store online, socially, flickr, instagram.

Featured image my own, IMG_5868 | John Johnston | Flickr CC-BY, sort of hunting idea. The kind of Pokemon I look for.

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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 ↩