Kind: Articles

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

Posted on
by

Likes The Verb – The Sound Design Verb – BBC Sounds.

Ian McMillan celebrates spectral spaces, the pulse of the body, and the power of repetition, in a Verb which showcases emerging talent – new sound designers from the Sound First scheme ….

Ian is joined by the songwriter, producer and sound designer Benbrick, the poet, playwright and performer Hannah Silva, and Sound First participant Noah Lawson, to explore what sound design can bring to poems, and what sounds are buried in poems themselves.

Really enjoyed listening to this, perhaps I am a wee bit more tuned into sound after Sunday.

Posted on
by
Robin at dawn. Dither image. It was poor anyhow due to light.

The above is a short selection of a few moments of the stream I broadcast this morning, 10 minutes in total. The segments are each separated by 1 seconds of generated silence. The Whole thing is on the Stream Page.  There is a fox barking near the start and a pigeon claps its wings over head near the end.

Continue reading →

Posted on
by
Screenshots of HikeTracker, map on the left, stats on the right

I’ve been looking for a replacement for Trails .

There are quite a lot of GPX apps out there so it has been interesting looking at them.
Many ‘hiking’ apps are concerned with giving you routes or posting routes you take their own or other services. These apps tend to be quite fully featured and often need an account on an online service. Trying a few out gave me a chance to think of what I wanted.

  1. Easy recording of a trail
  2. Trail shown live on a map, preferably OpenStreeMap.
  3. Quick and simple transfer of gpx track to my mac so that I can use it to tag photos, etc.
  4. Not completely killing the battery of my aging iPhone over a day.

Other features are either a bonus (some stats) or a complication (online services).

I’ve settled, for now at least, on HikeTracker . The app has been designed by a hiker, with the main aim of accuracy & simplicity. It fulfils all of my requirements.

The app is set up to work well “out of the box” for a hiker or walker – just tap “Start” and go!

It has worked well for me in a couple of tests, geotagging some rather blurry photos and giving me a track to add to the map.

I was happy to pay for trails and would be happy to pay for this free app too.

Featured image: Screenshots of HikeTracker, map on the left, stats on the right.

Posted on
by

In reply to So long, Twitter API, and thanks for all the fish by Ryan Barrett.

Well, it’s come to this. Twitter is burning, a billionaire owes money, an API will soon get lobotomized, so Bridgy‘s Twitter support will die within the month.

A lot of the reactions on my blog come from Twitter thanks to Bridgy. A marvellous service. I really disliked it when Twitter swallowed comments, then Bridgy came to the rescue. Thanks so much for all of Bridgy.

Posted on
by

I’ve been testing and using FeedLand for a while now. Today Dave posted the roadmap

1. FeedLand is a feed management system for individuals and groups. So far it’s only been offered as a free service on the web.

and

4. Here’s the big news: The new FeedLand server software will be available as open source, so anyone will be able to run a FeedLand instance. It’s a Node.js application. Uses MySQL. You may want to hook up an S3 bucket for special features like RSS feeds for Likes. At first email sending will be via Amazon SES, the method I currently use. It will be possible to plug in new drivers to use other email services.

As someone who has been pretty excited about RSS for years this sounds great.

Wayback when ScotEduBlogs was a ruby app1, I had this wild idea that a visitor could create a subset of the feeds on the site, save that and view the subset in some way. I think an instance of FeedLand could do just that.

Apart from the unknown of how running FeedLand would work2 I think there are a couple of barriers:

  1. The lack of blogs about Scottish education, maybe twitter problems will help that).
  2. The lack of knowledge about RSS. Andrew McLaughlin’s post Education needs free, safe spaces for creation, collaboration and discussion. and TES Article How a return to blogs and wikis could benefit teachers | Tes gives hope there.

Most online discussion of education and even news from schools has been on twitter. I’ve always felt uneasy about that. More than ever now 3. Maybe 2023 will see a RSSurgance;-)

  1. Created by Robert Jones with the help of Pete Liddle and cheered on by myself.↩
  2. I am hoping to be able to test than soon. ↩
  3. For example: Twitter team responsible for removing child exploitation on site cut in half since Musk takeover, report claims and No more Tweetbot or Twitterrific on Twitter | Mashable ↩

Posted on
by
ChatGPT discussion screenshot. Text in blog post.

I’ve read a bit about ChatGPT use in education, there is a lot about 1

I’ve been kicking the tyres of ChatGPT a little. Even on the surface it is quite interesting.

I have tried a couple of things that might be useful. One is to get some JavaScript functions for a little fun. It did what I wanted. The other was perhaps more pertinent to teaching.

I wanted to knock out a couple of simple cloze procedures, making up sentences is one of the more tedious tasks so I though I’d give ChatGPT a shot. I asked:

Me: can you give me sentences for 10 year old using each of these words feat
feet
mail
male
leak
leek
meat
meet

ChatGPT: Sure! Here are some sentences using each of these words:

"I am so proud of my little sister's feat of climbing to the top of the jungle gym all by herself!"
"I can't believe how big my feet have gotten since I was a baby."
"I need to go to the post office to mail this letter to my pen pal in France."
"My uncle is a male doctor."
"There's a small leak in the roof that needs to be fixed before it starts raining."
"I love adding sliced leek to my salads for a little extra flavor."
"I can't wait to have a barbecue and cook some juicy meat on the grill."
"I have to go meet my friend at the library in an hour."

So I needed to fix the spelling of flavor and asked, with typo,  as in the screenshot,  for another sentence for male. I got a list. I needed to adjust the one I chose to make the lion lazy too.

It was easy enough to paste that into an H5P Fill in the Blanks Content and get a cloze in Glow Blogs.

Diversion to Other Geeky Territory

The Fill in the missing blanks content in H5P takes text with the words you want to be blank surrounded by asterisks. Since I’d copied the sentences into a text editor to replace the quotations, I set the document format to markdown, selected the words and pressed ⌘-i.

Markdown Text Edit Italic animation

I then wondered if I could get ChatGPT to add the asterisks for me, so I asked: with an asterisk before and after each word. This it did, but as it typed then it seems that ChatGPT uses markdown, so as it typed the closing astrisk the enclosed word became italic. So back TextMate for me.

  1. ChatGPT & Education – Google Slides and Some ill-formed thoughts about AI, robot colleagues, resistance, refusal. are both interesting. ↩

Posted on
by

A very interesting read: How a return to blogs and wikis could benefit teachers | Tes

Unlike social media, these older content-creation tools did not restrict the length of contributions or steal your attention every waking moment with incessant dopamine-releasing notifications. Instead, they allowed developing thoughts to be published, ideas shared and shaped, links made to like-minded thinkers, and documents to be written collaboratively – the very values cherished by both luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment and the creator of the web.

And

What was missing in 2010 was any sort of directory: a working record 1 of the many flowering blogs, themes and ideas. A “ScotsEdu” wiki would quickly establish this, editable by all, allowing for information to be updated quickly and providing a map for educators, linking ideas, papers and research.

In short, it would provide a one-stop shop to support an ongoing national discussion about Scottish education.

I saw this article via twitter after a link was tweeted by Ollie Bray. Ironically Ollie was once a very prolific Scottish educational blogger.

A working record

A working record is not missing, but perhaps un-noticed. ScotEduBlogs has a record of posts going back to 2006!

ScotEduBlogs goes back to a Wiki started by Ewan McIntosh on Wikispaces. When the list of blogs became a bit to long to follow by clicking links, we 2 created ScotEduBlogs . At first it consisted of a aggregation of posts from across Scotland and a supporting Wiki. Over the years it has shrunk to an aggregation site now maintained, in a fairly lax fashion, by myself.

The site started aggregating class & teacher blogs. After the move to WordPress I reduced it to ‘professional’ blogs. It had gained some higher education blogs, but the frequency of posts has dropped.

The article made me visit the backend of SEB for the first time in a while. Much to my embarrassment I found a request to join by the TES article’s author Andrew McLaughlin. I’ve now added his blog. The form on the site has failed to send me an email. I added a link to email me requests, which should do as a stopgap.

I took a moment to improve the menus on mobile.  I also set up a mastodon account for SEB so that people can get the link to new activity in their mastodon account in the same way as they could follow the twitter account. Given the current twitter woes, I hope the mastodon account will be useful.

It might be time for a revival of ScotEduBlogs. I would be delighted to add more sites. I’d also be interested in any ideas for improving the site

Personally I rarely visit the SEB site, I subscribe to its RSS Feed in my feed reader. This gives me all the news from all the blogs in SEB without having to subscribe to them all individually.

  1. My emphasis ↩
  2. The original site was created by Robert Jones along with Pete Liddle, I just made suggestions. ↩