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traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body

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The FeedLand blogroll on Drummer blogs was a snip to set up. Here is mine. Looks very nice imo. I’ve not been blogging via drummer for a year, but Dave says there is a WordPress plugin in the works.

I’ve had my feedland blogroll on my WordPress site in a couple of different ways, via Jan’s plugin on the sidebar and my own script on a page. This is more interesting. Like Frank, I hope I can get the blogroll on it’s own page on my WordPress site. I am also just dumping my whole FeedLand list at the moment. I think I’d want to edit that down for a blog roll, perhaps missing out the more obvious links in favour of folk who I interact with.

I’ve had a blogroll on my site for most of its existence. There seems to be a bit of a resurgence at the moment. Hopefully this will lead to a more open and connected web. Dave’s version expands the concept from a list of links towards a feed reader experience. I am wondering if it is heading towards the way Ton’s feedreader seems to work. As it stands it is a great way to get reference links while writing.

Finally I and enjoying writing this post in Drummer, and am going to post it to my WordPress blog with a script Frank shared.

Published on my Oldschool Drummer blog

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In reply to https://x.com/Mr_Minchin/status/1778675103540125929.

Maybe it’s because it’s been the holidays and I’ve had more time on my phone – but the amount of hate speech on social platforms 😥 People like Joey Barton able to tweet with impunity, vile TikTok comments the norm & never removed. More work for teachers brewing

Blair Minchen

And still we are here. It boggles my mind that nations, governments, schools use social media as their main conduit of information, platforms that they have no control of.

Internet pile-ons are pivotal to the plot. Do you use social media?
No, I’ve never had a Facebook account or anything. I find it depressing for people on the left to indulge the mechanisms of neoliberal tech-bro billionaires who make huge profits from algorithms that enable a bearpit mentality.

from today’s observer I’m on the left – I’ve been in a union for years – Sunjeev Sahota

ironically, perhaps, the online title is Sunjeev Sahota: ‘I’ve always been in labour movements – but I’m critical of identity politics’

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My class joined in the ‘ AI Wonderland: Unleash Creativity with Make it hAPPen (P4-P7)’ webinar on Monday. It was a useful introduction for their age group on a topic we had not explored in class. In Teams I noticed this TeachMeet1 too. I finally signed up for it on Wednesday.

Given it started at 3:30 on Thursday and school finished for the easter holidays at 2:30, it was a bit of a rush.

I had planned, the night before, to talk a bit about using ChatGPT for creating H5P content in Glow Blogs. I knocked up a quick keynote of screenshots to avoid the danger of live.

ChatGPT can quickly produce information which, once checked, can be used to create H5P content. What is especially useful is that it can format the information to work with HP5 textual inputs. I’ve put some instructions on the Glow Blogs H5P examples site.

The TeachMeet was quite quiet, 3:30 on the last day of term was probably tricky for most folk. I enjoyed the other things shared, although I didn’t grab any links, except for Diffit. I hope to get the rest when the recording is released.

Most of the sharing mirrored mine in that they involved creating resources, quizzes and the like. One idea that stood out, and one I intend to use, was taking an interesting phrase from pupils’ writing and using it as an image prompt in Bing (I believe). This was demonstrated to the whole class and sounds like it would generate interesting discussions.

I’ve used some of the free AI tools, mostly ChatGPT, for a while now. Mostly for simple text generation and some JavaScript or AppleScript help. I don’t doubt that, despite some glitches, that it is potential useful and interesting.

Is that an Elephant?

There are a lot of difficult and awkward questions around the use of GPT in teaching & learning. I’ve read a fair bit of discussion around the ethics at both ends of the process, but not much discussing the primary school level.

Things that worry me, beyond my knowledge, time, brain power or pay grade2:

  • The obvious, ethics around where the data comes from, scraping possible copyrighted works.
  • The bias of the data, racial bias is the one I’ve read about most, but I imagine there are many others.
  • Possible breaches of pupil/student data, safeguarding issues.
  • The commercial nature of the tools. A lot of these services seem to be freemium, with either a limited or time limited resource set.

I’ll keep using AI in a casual way with minimum risk (I hope), but it feels like education is stepping into a can of worms in the same sort of way we have adopted most technology, in a rather haphazard way.

Feature image is an old gif I made from a public domain photo a few years ago.

  1. I’ve not been to a TeachMeet for a while so this intrigued me as much as AI ↩︎
  2. Over the time it has taken me to type this post I see this: Women’s faces stolen for AI ads selling ED pills and praising Putin – The Washington Post, this AI – two reports reveal a massive enterprise pause over security and ethics. I also asked ChatGPT to give me 400 words on the pros and cons of using AI in education. I’d say there is a lot of confusion about. ↩︎

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A screenshot of Flickr thumbnails ordered by month, flora for May, June & July.

As someone with an interest in natural history, I often look forward to seasonal occurrences, the first cuckoo or blackthorn blossom.

I also keep track of some of these things here on my blog and on Flickr. I find searching both places useful for all sorts of reasons, but not for figuring out what to expect or remembering when I’ve heard the first cuckoo.

A while back I, sort of solved the problem here by making a page that allows me to search the blog and order the results by the date without the years.

I’ve been playing about with Flickr searches in the same way and now have a simple page which searches for a tag and order the page by months, ignoring the years. The page loads the tag flora by default. If you give it a t parameter, it will search for that instead: ?t=butterfly. I’ve also brefly tested a u parameter for username. This needs to be a user’s NSID (71428177@N00 not troutcolor), it defaults to mine.

It also also loads the first 500 images, which is a bridge I’ll need to cross for some tags soon.

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Illustration of Atlantic salmon

Despite mealy-mouthed words about sustainability and transparency the salmon industry is Scotland’s disgrace. The gap between the iconic identity of salmon as a wild symbol of natural Scotland, and the reality is massive. The potential to completely replace this industry with regenerative genuinely sustainable jobs is huge, but the Scottish Government seems to be missing a massive open goal here, instead propping up (and covering up) for short-term lucrative gain. A mass boycott of salmon should be the goal to exert pressure on government and industry.

Scotland’s Salmon Crisis

Also: island split over plans for salmon farm

I remember, as a wee boy, seeing the netting station at the mouth of the Spey, piles of fresh run wild salmon. I now avoid eating salmon.

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gif of kidpix 'bomb' rummer

This is a blast from the past. This was one of the first applications I saw first apps when I first used computers. My classes at the time really enjoyed using this.

The other apps I remember from those days included Claris Works1 and HyperCard2
Amazing to see a Mac with kid pix running in emulation at archive.org. It feels snappier than the LCs we had back then.

A pity I can’t get it going on iOS as I’d love to see my current class using it. The is a dialogue to input your name and I can’t type in it on iPad. Workarounds welcome.

The featured image is of the ‘bomb’ eraser ,which my pupils would use endlessly.

  1. I really enjoyed teaching with Claris Works, the drawing documents were great for teaching about layers, rotation etc and could be compared to the paint docs. ↩︎
  2. First as a source of clip art, then as everything. ↩︎

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How to Not Waste Your Only Life Debating Direct Instruction and Inquiry-Based Learning

Teachers will do what works for them and they won’t do what doesn’t work for them. It is true that “what works” in a very well-defined context is an empirical question. You can study it. You can referee two different teaching approaches using assessment scores, survey results, classroom observations, meta-analyses—all the usual tools.

Posters — Jamie Clark I like the Dylan Williams influenced ones…


Learn p5.js for Creative Coding – 5 Beginner Projects – YouTube I have played with p5.js on and off, but never got too far. THis course seems short enough to be doable.


Sora Pretty crazy, video AI linked everywhere.

RedKetchup – Online Tools A nice set of online tools to do simple stuff with images that I prefer to do on the desktop. Handy for time I don’t have access to familiar tools. Got a 20 second delay on download if you don’t upgrade, via Aaron

How To Pay Attention. 20 Ways To Win The War Against Seeing | by Rob Walker | re:form | Medium I think I saw this 2014 post a few times before. Still enjoyed it. Some might be fun with class.