Category Archives: wwwd

Mostly stuff to do with the classroom & Teaching and learning. Posts that fit with the site’s description: “Teaching, ict, and suchlike”

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The Internet With A Human Face – Beyond Tellerrand 2014 Conference Talk

The first thing to centralize was search. Google found a superior way to index our web, and the other search engines faded away. Then Google acquired the one true ad network, and wrote the dominant analytics suite.

Email centralized in the face of rampant spam, with attractive offers of free storage to sweeten the deal.

Facebook won the social network wars in the US, and began gobbling up competitors in other countries.

The mobile devices that are taking over the web fall into one of two camps. One of them pretends to be more open than the other, but it’s mostly a matter of marketing. In practice they both have complete control of their ecosystem.

I tumbled and tweeted another quote from this presentation yesterday. You could easily quote the words that go with every slide. I’d highly recommend reading this if you are at all interested in the internet, privacy and information.

I am coming back to it today thinking that the awareness of your online presence, the data trails you leave and the consequences should sit squarely with internet safety in schools.

Maciej Ceglowski the presenter, run the wonderful Pinboard bookmarking service. He is also a painter who has painted in Scotland.

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A quick test

I am posting this from the editorial an interesting iOS app.

Editorial is a plain text editor for the iPad with powerful automation tools and a beautiful inline preview for writing Markdown

I've only made a few quick tests with the app but it looks like it will be of interest with folk who like scripting. Editorial has a python based automation system with which users can use and build workflows. You edit these workflow in the app itself.

Although I know no python I managed to edit the publish to metaweblogapi workflow to work with this pivotx blog. I also managed to import and configure the FTP image upload script

I am writing this post in markdown and hoping my blog understands it or that the publish script converts to html first. Update I needed to add conver to html to the workflow. This was simple.

It looks like there are plenty of workflows to install and much for the tinkerer to play with.

My own use of the iPad has changed over time and I am not sure this is for me. I mainly use my iPad for browsing, reading RSS (and posting findings to tumblr & twitter), social media, note taking , email and some light image and video editing. I've a few workflow type things that I do in Drafts but that is about it. I'll probably poke around in Editorial and see how it goes. I guess you can't have enough choice in ways to post to a blog.

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I’ve written here about FeedWordPress quite a few times and if you have spoken to me about technology for learning I’ve probably mentioned it to you too. FeedWordPress is a WordPress plugin that lets you aggregate, on the one blog, many blogs (or other sources that provide RSS).

FeedWordPress is used extensively on DS106 (Which I probably talk about far to much for my co-workers comfort) and we now use it on ScotEduBlogs to aggregate over 100 Scottish educational blogs.

I’ve posted about how I think this would be a great tool for learning in schools, allowing pupils to work in there own spaces but pull project related content from multiple sources together.

I’ve just found a wonderful example of this in use (somewhat more interesting than ScotEdublogs and easier to grasp than ds106)

This site allows 20 students to record botanical findings, they do so by posting to their own blogs. The results are aggregated on to Field Botany | Plants of the James River Park System, There are already 700 posts.

Belle Isle

The students can post photos and informatino straight to their blogs with mobile phones while in the field.

Tom Woodward on who’s blog I discovered this site explains the details:

This early days for the site but in the end the intrepid biology duo of Jill Reid and Dianne Jennings will worked with their students to create a site that local residents can use to identify plants in our James River Park System.

Tom goes onto explain how he set the site up and the plugins used.

Glow Blogs

One of the problems with suggesting FeedWordPress for learning is that it requires a fair bit of work to get going, you cannot use it on WordPress.com, edublogs or other sites that host blogs for you, you need to set up your own hosting and add and configure the plugin. As we work our way through requirements and procurement of the new blogging solution for glow the possibility of being able to offer this sort of factuality is very exciting…

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I’ve been keeping half an eye on the digital commonwealth project since talking to David on Edutalk. Last weekend I was doing a little blogging about the project and taking a short walk or two. One of the many attractive aspects of the project is that it invites people to think about the word and concept of commonwealth. Coincidently I read, not for the first time, a newish sign on the path to Loch Humphrey.

Commonwealth

This is an area I’ve started to really enjoy over the last few years. I feel it fits very well with my idea of commonwealth.

The start of the walk, by the gasworks, is about 15 minutes drive from Glasgow, and near public transport. It is popular, runners, mountain bikers, power walkers, ramblers of all shapes and sizes are there early to late. There is a fairly well graded track to the Loch if you need to keep your feet dry, or you can zig-zag the fields and moor. You will usually see a few wild flowers and the odd bit of wild life if you keep your eyes open. Once you are past the first hill the traffic noise stops. Out beyond the Loch it feels surprisingly isolated if you are early enough.

This seems to me to be a precious resource and although owned by farmers and the forestry commission (I guess), it feels as if some of the experience is part of our common wealth.

Mapping The Commonwealth

Over the years I’ve made efforts to record walks in various ways, posterous, fargo, and lots of map mashups. Recently I’ve had another go at this, this time trying to really simplify the workflow. I’ve ended up with a html template that uses a kml file produced by the Trails iPhone app and a flickr set. So to produce a page like this: Duncolm Mostly Floral I:

  1. Take a walk, record the track with trails, take some pictures.
  2. Stick the kml file in a folder in dropbox.
  3. Upload the photos to a new flickr set.
  4. Duplicate an html file, change the url of the kml file and the id of the flickr set.
  5. Write a couple of lines on notes in the html file.

I think this could be improved as a workflow with some sort of simple template. This would contain on separate line: A title; the flickr set’s id; the kml file and the notes.

Walk map

I’ve been fascinated with sort of recording/notetalking/storytelling for a fair while now and it is sort of my unofficial ‘digital commonwealth’.

I continue to see that this sort of activity could be great fun in class and there many ways to mash up maps, words and images. Wouldn’t it be great if the new glow blog solution had a Geo-Rss plugin for fold to activate.

I’d recommend showing the digital commonwealth to your class, whatever age and stage and at least borrowing some of the ideas for using digital media, if you do not join in. If you do want to join in I believe there are still places for a few more schools to receive some support.

David tell me there is still room for a few more schools and you can get in touch via email or twitter: DigCW2014. They are particularly need schools in Borders, Angus, Perth & Kinross, W Lothian, Clackmannan, Stirling, W Dunbartonshire, East Ren, Renfrewshire.

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A while back on Radio Edutalk I had the pleasure of talking to David McGillivray about the Digital Commonwealth 1. It is a pretty exciting project:

The ambition of the Digital Commonwealth project is to enhance the capacity of individuals and groups to use freely available mobile digital (and social) media tools and techniques to ensure their voices are heard in a saturated (and often commercially) motivated media landscape. The Digital Commonwealth project focuses on lowering the threshold for involvement for individuals and groups so that they can be empowered to exploit creative tools and technologies to tell their stories, digitally. The project reaches out to individuals and groups experiencing social, cultural or economic marginalization, whether related to age, ethnicity, poverty, disability or social isolation.

Digital Commonwealth

Since then I’ve heard that there are now 60 schools involved with the project along side a host of other community groups. The twitter stream is filled with delight: Twitter / Search – #digCW2014.

David tell me there is still room for a few more schools and you can get in touch via email or twitter: Digital Commonwealth (DigCW2014) on Twitter. They are particularly looking for:

Some highlights of the project include:

You can find out more about the projects on the Digital Commonwealth site fascinating to see social media being used across sectors.

1. Radio #EDUtalk 11-9-2013: David McGillivray | EDUtalk ↩

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Bridgy lets you post to social networks – and comment, like, reshare, and
more – from your own web site. It also pulls other people’s comments, likes, and
reshares of your posts back to your site. In
IndieWeb lingo, Bridgy lets you
POSSE to
the silos easily and
backfeed the responses
automatically.
Check
out this example, or see the docs for more details.

from: Bridgy

This looks like a really exciting development in social media. Recently most of the commentary on blog posts has moved to twitter, g+ or facebook. This looks like it could link that up and push out posts and then pull comments made on other sites back to your blog.

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Aloe polyphylla Schönland ex Pillans Counterclockwise Spiral by brewbooks
Attribution-ShareAlike License

As mentioned in the previous post we are gathering requirements for a new wiki service in glow.

The current wiki solution, mindtouch is now no longer supported so we need a different flavour of wiki going forward. This is a great opportunity to think about how wikis can be used in learning.

We would like to hear from as many Scottish educators and learners with views on wikis. As part of this process we have put up a short survey and invite anyone interested to respond. If you are involved in Scottish education, a potential glow user, please take a few minutes to fill in the survey. This is a real chance to affect the future of Glow.

I would of course be happy to chat or otherwise communicate about wikis. If you would like to get in touch via a comment here, a tweet to @johnjohnston or with the #glowscot tag or any other method of communication. If you are not interested in wikis, but know someone who is, please pass this on.

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Glowgrind

It has been quite a while since I posted about glow. This is not what I expected, made a few posts before I started (here or here for example), where I wrote:

This should let me look back and think ‘how naïf’ or let other folk say, but you said…

I am still holding to the content and ideas in these posts, but I am feeling that I was naïf. I had no idea of the complexities of doing such a large project in a government environment.

I thought it was all about working in an agile environment. I hadn’t really understood that the agile bit would come in when developing happens in-house. Before that happens a lot of other ducks need to line up. Much of this seems to be meeting requirements for procurement. Understanding the best options and ones which gives best value to the taxpayer. For some bits of glow agile may never happen.

Blogs, blogs, blogs…

I am still spending most of my time on the blog migration and we are beginning to see some progress. The whole thing is, again, much more complex than I imagined. The current blog system relies on Sharepoint 2003 and the old authentication system both of these are going away. By relies I mean knitted into and this first needed unpicking. Some of this unpicking went on at the same time as we produced (and revised and revisited) the requirements for a new system. Both the unpicking and requirements have moved on.

We are now at the point of getting some WordPress expertise in to aid out Technical Architects. This required another procurement exercise! After we get advice from them, the Technical Architects will give advice on technical options. Next the requirements will get revisited. Finally the the solution procured (I’ve probably missed out many steps here, but hopefully it gives a flavour).

Meanwhile

We have been doing other things, there are other projects, much to discuss. One interesting way that projects develop here. A set of principles are laid down first. For glow Ian and I are involved in this process. Nothing that would surpass anyone who thinks about online education but it will be good to get them fixed in stone. We will be refining these alone with two new product owners, John Sexton and Christine Lamont when they start after Easter.

Wiki Requirements – Help

We are now starting to look at requirements for Wikis. I’d be delighte to talk to anyone in Scottish education interested in Wikis. Especially ones who have used Glow or other wikis in learning and teaching. Comment here, tweet @johnjohnston or #glowscot or get in touch inside glow (the O365 newsfeed for example) if you would like a chat.

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I keep a tumblr of enviable stuff, here are a couple of recent quotes I’ve stashed there:

Openness

Openness helps here. Open technologies allow users to innovate without permission. Open licensing is just part of that open technology jigsaw; open standards another; open access and accessibility a third. Open interfaces accessed sideways. And so on.

from: Mixing Stuff Up | OUseful.Info, the blog…

Which give me an excuse to link to OPEN SCOTLAND – Promoting the development and adoption of open education policies and practices in Scotland. #openscot and http://declaration.openscot.net/. It looks like thinkgs migt be opening up here.

How to do new things

The best way to learn something is to start doing it. Don’t wait for full knowledge to come to you. Often it won’t. Just pretend you know what you’re doing, and hit the walls. That helps define the shape of the problem. Make it small enough that you can start solving it right now, without waiting. Each part of the problem is smaller than the whole thing. And tell yourself you can do it, because you can.

from: How to do new things

And a couple of bonus links from pinboard:
Everyone is miserable. We are uninformed. We are lonely and scared. and to lighten the tone:
Muvi X-Lapse for time lapse panoramics | Jon Gill, I’d love one of these.

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One of  favourite online learning activities is DS106. I've blogged about it here had have a whole blog where I publish my DS106 learning.

Ds106 is a rather unique experience, it is an undergraduate course at the university of Mary Washington(and other places) on Digital Storytelling but anyone in the world can join in.

Last Autumn I took part in the Headless 13 iteration of DS106, a course without a link to a 'real' class for open online participants only.

I enjoyed the course immensely and was a amazed at the creativity and energy  of my fellow participants. At the end of the course one person, Mariana Funes,  posted a reflection on the course in 106 bullet points. Mariana was interested in teasing these ideas out  a bit more and asked me if I'd be interested in helping out with a podcast and internet radio show. I was delighted.

We are planning 106 episodes, each 15 minutes long, to be broadcast at 8pm on Sunday evenings on DS106 Radio. They will then be archived as a podcast, currently in EDUtalk.

The podcast is called in punning fashion “The Ds106 Good Spell” and we are having a bit of fun around. Imagery, slogans, and audio branding.

The idea of the show is to think about DS106, online learning, creativity and collaboration.   Like some of Mariana's bullet points DS106 can, at first, feel a little had to understand from the outside, hopefully we can help decode both bullets and the course in a way that is interesting and informative to others and fun for ourselves.

If 106 episodes are not enough we started with Episode 0 giving some background:

We now have Episode 1 under our belts:

and episode 2 will be broadcast on Sunday  6th April 2014. You can listen live at DS106 Radio and we are archiving the audio on  106 DS106 Bullets page on EDUtalk.