Kind: Articles

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

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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.

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montage of 6 webpage screenshots: https://ecohustler.com/technology/blue-empire-the-norwegian-salmon-industry-consumes-25percent-of-all-wild-fish-caught-globally https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/curation-is-the-last-best-hope-of-intelligent-discourse https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wmg/about/outreach/resources/turtlestitch/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3jrgYnljYI https://projects.kwon.nyc/internet-is-fun/ https://lessons.wesfryer.com/courses/coding/scratch-coding

School

Lessons by Dr. Wesley Fryer @wfryer – Scratch Coding We use Scratch a bit in class so adding this to a pile of links.

A variation on Turtle/Scratch stuff, there is some CPD coming up

Turtlestitch is freely available software that enables the generation and stitching of patterns using a digital embroidery machine. It gives programmatic control of the machine, enabling a wide range of patterns to be designed and stitched onto fabric. It was developed by Andrea Mayr-Stalder, and runs in a browser window.

Mac

TipBITS: Always Show Window Proxy Icons – TidBITS Bless TidBITS for this. I’ve been quiety grumbling for a while. As someone with poor window management I’ve alway loved proxy icons.

Internet

The role of human curators is not just to select and present content but to imbue the digital landscape with a sense of reliability and authenticity that only human insight can provide.

Curation is the last best hope of intelligent discourse. — Joan Westenberg

I’ve been meaning to write some kind of Important Thinkpiece™ on the glory days of the early internet, but every time I sit down to do it, I find another, better piece that someone else has already written. So for now, here’s a collection of articles that to some degree answer the question “Why have a personal website?” with “Because it’s fun, and the internet used to be fun.”

The internet used to be fun

Nature

Blue Empire: the Norwegian salmon industry consumes 2.5% of all wild fish caught globally | Ecohustler I avoid Salmon due to the sea lice and the effect on wild stocks here.

Music

Jumping right into the middle:

Since the castro problems I’ve been using Pocket Casts as my podcatcher. I don’t love it or hate it. I kept my Castro Pro sub going Now there is perhaps some hope.

We are excited to announce Castro has been purchased by Bluck Apps.

both Aurelian and Castro are designed to give a delightful experience to people who really love podcasts and listen to many of them. This is a niche, and we intend to serve that niche. If you have over 100 podcast subscriptions and listen to them all semi-regularly, you are probably one of our people.

Castro is Back

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A montage of 9 webpages mention in the article.

Aide or Answer – Learning with Artificial Intelligence – Read Write Respond

With this in mind, for me I feel that AI tools are useful as an aide, but I am circumspect about using them as the answer. I guess time will tell.

Walk to Auld Wives Lifts I need to have a wee walk to the Auld Wives Lifts

Tom Coates on how Threads will integrate with the Fediverse

Who knows? Maybe we’ll get the interoperable shared, open social web that many of us have wanted for the last twenty plus years? Wilder things have happened. Fingers crossed?

A less positive view of Meta:

Meet ‘Link History,’ Facebook’s New Way to Track the Websites You Visit

As lawmakers introduce tech regulations and Apple and Google beef up privacy restrictions, Meta is doubling down and searching for new ways to preserve its data harvesting empire.

The company pitches Link History as a useful tool for consumers “with your browsing activity saved in one place,” rather than another way to keep tabs on your behavior.

Scripting News: Friday, January 12, 2024

That’s the thing we really need to escape from, being monetized. The only respectful way to be monetized is to pay for something worth paying for, roughly what it costs, plus a reasonable margin of profit.

RemovePaywall | Free online paywall remover

Remove Paywall works by finding archived versions of a website. These archived pages do not have a paywall
and allow readers to get the article without having to pay or being forced to log in.

Marlon James on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, Authenticity as Pose, and Not Reading His Book Reviews ‹ Literary Hub

I think the thing about Led Zeppelin and the Stones is that they dig music–particularly black music–after the fact. The difference between them and Dylan is that Dylan digs culture as it’s happening. And I think that’s a big difference. It’s why Talking Heads sound like Talking Heads, you know?

Top 100 Tunes from Scotland 2023 (25–1): Young Fathers to Jesus & Mary Chain | The Herald

11 Michael Timmons & Yoker Moon – Practice

Recorded mostly live and apparently musically improvised with Glasgow electronic musician Yoker Moon, the East Kilbride songwriter Michael Timmons has placed an evocative and fragile lyrical hook within a tense computer generated soundscape.

My son-in-law at number 11

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I’ve now been running blogs with & for my classes since 2005. I still find them a really useful tool for teaching and learning. The focus and content has changed continually over the years.

Back in the noughties I was keen on having my class blog kept up by pupils (archive.org link).

I find this harder to organise now, not sure if it is my age, the demands of the curriculum or something else. Pupils in my class now post to their e-Portfolios1 and add pieces of work to the class blog which I collate into posts. I also pinch quotes from their e-portfolios for the class blog2.

Like my own blog here I still find my class blog a great resource to remember & review. Of course it is a curated view. Much depends on what I am finding most interesting at the time. I both enjoy reading back and use it as a tool when asked for feedback or a record of some sort.

I was somewhat cheered up by Matt Mullenweg’s birthday. Sometimes it feels like WordPress is focused on content management. Matt’s post show that blogging is still loved.
While content management is a main focus of Glow Blogs my love is blogging. I still think we are only scratching the surface of the use of WordPress in school3.

Posts Last Term (Oct 2023 – Dec 2023 on my class blog )

  1. Glow Blogs – WordPress blogs for Scottish Education ↩
  2. example of quote collection↩
  3. H5P for example ↩
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In reply to Reads and Feeds and the Right Bowl of web Porridge – CogDogBlog.

a blog post of meandering paths and uncertain destinations

Hi Alan, What better type of post could there be. Surprisingly, being a Scot, I prefer RSS porridge to the real thing. Your post is full of tasty discursions (I grabbed the NYT bookmarklet worked a treat to follow the reading).

Seeing the link to River of News, you might be interested in Dave Winer’s feedland.com. I’ve been playing with it and there is a lot to like about this RSS reader. (I also use inoreader and NetNewsWire). I use nitter to pass a few twitter feeds into Feedland as it supports RSS.

Thinking about online community, commercialization & size I keep coming back to theDS106 model & micro.blog. Both in essence or part are RSS readers. I think, without knowing the details, I prefer the simplicity of RSS over ActivityPub. For example a smaller Goodreads could just aggregate a tag/category of a set of blogs using some agreed taxonomies.

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A montage of screenshots of webpages: https://wanderprompts.com/ https://www.pipes.digital/ https://bobboteck.github.io/joy/joy.html https://andywightman.scot/2023/12/land-for-the-people-scotland-bill/ https://codepen.io/ste-vg/pen/BazEQbY https://jonathanbossenger.com/2023/12/wordpress-as-a-game-development-platform/

Christmas Cannon everyone needs one of these.

Land for the People (Scotland) Bill – Land Matters Andy Wightman’s proposals for a comprehensive Land Reform Bill.

redefine Scotland’s system of land tenure as conditional tenure with (broadly defined) statutory responsibilities as well as rights. The particulars of how these will be interpreted can be set out in secondary legislation. They will include legal duties to conserve natural processes and restore ecosystems.

bobboteck/JoyStick: A simple JoyStick that use HTML5, Canvas and Vanilla JavaScript, for touch and mouse interfaces I used this for a silly wee #ds106 daily. Might be useful for something for school.

WordPress as a game development platform. – Jonathan Bossenger

There is still a lot of work to be done to turn this into a working game, but I’m excited about the possibilities. Stay tuned, because I can see this turning into a bit of a series of posts…

I wonder if we will get to the point when you can make something simple with html/css/JavaScript in the block editor? I don’t think that is the direction this post is pointing, but it made me think.

Documentation | Pipes

Pipes is a spiritual successor to Yahoo! Pipes, but if you did not know that site, you can think of Pipes as a visual programing editor specialized on feeds, or a visual shell, or simply as a glorified feed configurator.

Wander Prompts,

Ready to walk? Swipe down.

I think a lot of these links came from Joe, either directly or by wandering from his starting point. He is a serendipity engine.

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Bing:

Yes, I can make a montage from image URLs. I can combine multiple images into one layout and add some effects and text to make it more appealing. 😊

To make a montage, you need to give me the URLs of the images you want to use, separated by commas. For example, you can type something like this:

https://example.com/image1.jpg, https://example.com/image2.png, https://example.com/image3.gif

Me:
can you make a montage from these images: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53416455853_f0199ace12_b.jpg,https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53416288176_f0199ace12_b.jpg,https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53370766129_d6b3a4f7f3_b.jpg,https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53370643338_c6227c09b6_b.jpg,https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53370766219_9b52b8624c_b.jpg mosaic style

Bing:

Yes, I can make a montage from these images in mosaic style. I will try to make it interesting and colorful. 😊

Please wait a moment while I generate the montage for you. 🙏

A screenshot of 4 images generated by bing, not what was asked for.

Me: hmm I don’t see any of the images I asked to be used in the montage?

Bing: can you check … big list of things to check with my system…

Me:
no, you made a montage with some other graphics, not the images I specified.

Bing:

I apologize for the confusion. I am not capable of creating montages or graphics. I can only describe images and provide information about them. If you could provide me with more information about the images you are referring to, I will do my best to help you. 😊

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a montage of a screenshots of the 4 sites linked in the article: https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/INSECT-APOCALYPSE/egpbykdxjvq/ https://somafm.com/reggae/songhistory.html https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/ https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/12/05/an-applescript-for-safari-split-tabs-to-new-window

The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard – Mondo 2000 One of the more bizarre HyperCard Links I’ve collected.

HyperCard was a precurser to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the worldwide web. Six years later Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.

The collapse of insects A beautiful webpage with a terrifying message.

“Insects are the food that make all the birds and make all the fish,” said Wagner, who works at the University of Connecticut. “They’re the fabric tethering together every freshwater and terrestrial ecosystem across the planet.”

SomaFM Player: Heavyweight Reggae Sounds good to someone with ears of my vintage

Daring Fireball: An AppleScript for Safari: Split Tabs to New Window One of the reasons I subscribed to daring fireball was the scripts.

but in recent years here at DF I’ve gotten away from sharing my occasional scripting hacks, and feel like I ought to get back to sharing them.