Kind: Articles

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

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We have a rather special item on Radio EDUtalk this week on Thursday at 7:45pm UK time.

WE will be joined by Bonnie Stewart and course participants in Communications in Education at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. They will be discussing ‘Considering Networked Communications for Educators’. The class are using #ed473 on twitter.

Update We are hoping for a lot of interaction through twitter #edutalk and/or #ed473 and on a TitanPad (url wil be tweeted).

This can be though of as a whole-class presentation exploring the experience of building networks as educators. The whole class will be participating in one of four roles: presenting, responding to audio questions, responding/leading chat discussion, and live tweeting.

This is obviously quite different from our usual show, and even more than usual we would welcome as much audience participation as possible, so if you are free at 7:45 on Thursday have a listen to Radio EDUtalk

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Organic Networks - New Urban?
Photo: Organic Networks – New Urban?, Creative Commons — CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The latest crop from from my Pinboard link farm.

  • BBC News – Linking to free web content is legal, says EU Court

    Websites can link to freely available content without the permission of the copyright holder, the European Court of Justice says.

    PHEW!

  • TannerVision: Is Personalized Learning a Fad?

    I guess what I’m saying is that we need to start by making a difference in the lives of a few learners by being the caring person who provides a rich environment for them.

    From one of my favourite blogs, one of many thoughtful posts. (The answer given to the question is No.)

  • Sonic Pi

    Sonic Pi is an open source programming environment designed to explore and teach programming concepts through the process of creating new sounds. Sonic Pi comes with an associated scheme of work which emphasises the importance of creativity in the learning process and gives users the control to turn their sonic ideas into reality.

    Having little understanding of music I think this would be as opaque as minecraft to me, but looks like an interesting way into computer science, the scheme of work is for KS3. I’ve got a PI of my own, but never been in a position to work/play with pupils using one (or a few).

  • One sentence on Wikipedia: a microcosm of information literacy | Jisc Wikimedian Ambassador

    Role-playing as Wikipedia editors, learners could answer 1) how they would rewrite the text to be balanced, factual and non-promotional

    Really interesting looking blog, this one post gives a lot of food for some lessons on (internet) literacy.

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I agree wholeheartedly with Terry Anderson who recently wrote, “learning occurs through construction, annotation and maintenance of learning artefacts.” “Learning artefacts” are things you create like videos, essays, diagrams, concept maps, photo collages, etc. Because these artefacts are the core of your learning experience, it is critically important that you own these artefacts and have ongoing access to them. Consequently, all of the learning artefacts that you create for this course will be stored somewhere outside the learning management system. Specifically, these artefacts will be stored and maintained in a space controlled solely by you.

from: P2PU | Intro to Openness in Education David Wiley

Sounds like a good plan.

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Randomify

Some links harvested from my Pinboard:

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Some things I’ve Pinboard: bookmarked over the last week.

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I’ve now been working for the Scottish Government as a ‘Glow Product Owner’ for a month. This has been an interesting experience on lots of fronts.

On a practical level it means 4 hours or so commuting each day. This is not as bad as it sounds for someone who likes spending a fair bit of time looking at screens most days. There is wifi on the main Glasgow to Edinburgh trains and they are reasonable spaces to work on. So I get to spend about half the commute getting some, work, email, blogging, podcast editing and reading done. I’ve replaced the train wifi with a 4g wireless router. Interestingly I get up to 4 times my home broadband speed at some points, others it drops to 3G and there are a few dead zones.

What is a product owner anyway?

The work itself is a very different role than anything I’ve done before. My expectations were pretty wide of the mark. The role of a product owner is becoming a lot clearer. Last week we (Ian Stuart and myself) shadowed Education Scotland’s Jennifer McDougall in this role working with a set of developers who are working on a prototype. This was really valuable. We could see the product owner in action, finding out how the role really works. In these sorts of meeting the role is to represent the users (learners and teachers) and make decisions on the work in progress.

The product owner is one in an agile team and it is this team development process that give me confidence and hope in Glow.

As developments will be taken forward there will be constant dialog between the developers and product owners. Hopefully this means than when decisions are made about, say, dropping a feature to insure that a project meets deadlines, that that decision will be made in consultation with the product owner.

This then puts some pressure on the product owners to do their best to represent and balance both the vision of the ICT excellence group and all the stakeholders (picking up some jargon on the job).

Project Management, and other things I’d not imagined

Another feature of the process that will give some confidence is the way the whole project is organised. I’ve not worked in such a structured environment. There are folks in the team doing jobs I’d not imagined, a lot of these are to organise the project, keep it on track, ensure testing of systems will be carried out in a systematic manner. The people in these roles do not, in the main, have education experience, but we have been constantly encouraged by the way they ask questions that expose what learning needs from glow.

A fair bit of time has been spent by Ian and myself explaining as best we can: teaching and learning, the curriculum, the ICT excellence vision and, the hard bit, how the current mix of services that make up glow are joined together. This has been useful both ways, seeing the services from another perspective has shown me both how much of the basic functionality of glow groups is powerful and how complex and baffling the organisation of the elements of glow can look. The baffled look on the face of someone when they are taken through the setting up of an e-portfolio blog for the first time is a picture.

Harder than I expected

We are also getting a bit of inside into the complexity of developing services that will meet the needs of learning, security and a multitude of stakeholders. My brain feels as if it expanding to the point of pain at some times.

Much to the horror of my previous self this is not going to be a quick fix, most of the things that Ian and I are involved in are long term projects. Even the short term ones, for example the blog migration (close to my heart), are not going to happen overnight. Factors I has not considered swing into play. Luckily we are surrounded by folk who do understand them are at hand.

As an example: think about moving large amounts of data from one server to another, I would have though, pull out a hard drive, take it to the new data centre and plug it in. It seems that this is not the way it works, other customers of the new data centre may not be very happy with a stranger on the premises and worse plugging a drive into the network their precious data is on. This means data has to travel across networks and this takes time. That of course needs to be planned for. And so on…

One last Note

Although I am not directly involved in the new MS 365 bit of glow we are using those tools for working and communication. This has increased my awareness of the new goodness that is already in glow. Just thinking about skydrive and the office web apps by themselves we have got quite a nice bundle. 25GB of storage in skydrive (not to mention 50, I believe for email) and word, PowerPoint and excel in any modern browser. These apps are fairly fully featured and easy to use. You also have the ability to have more than one person editing documents at the same time in the same sort of way as google docs.

Ian would not forgive me if I did not mention OneNote, this has been a revelation. Ian and Islay High school make heave use of this in their long running one-to-one project. The desktop version is like a wiki without a browser with very powerful multi-media facilities. Given the security in the government building we cannot use the sharing built into 365 with desktop applications, but we can use the web version. This feels to me like a very simple light weight wiki without any of the complexities. Not the multi media powerhouse, Ian is used to, but a way to simple build a linked set of ‘pages’ and ‘sections’ in a multi user document. The page and sections are made automatically so you do not need to understand links and title. The sections in the web app are limited to styled text, images and links, but that would be plenty of features to get collaborative knowledge building off the ground.

We have found that OneNote I’d pretty good for sharing information is a fairly messy but quick way. Coincidently Charlie Love posted a nice youtube intro to Skydrive in glow.

If I was faced with thinking of how to get some quick benefits from glow with learners, this is where I would start, the office tools and as an introduction to online collaboration and collective knowledge building OneNote is a good place to start.

After a month I think I am beginning to find some ground under my feet but just starting to appreciate the size of the task. Ian and I have had a lot of good wishes via twitter and other networks, we appreciate this, so thanks, we will need them.

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The problem

If you open a link to the new MS 365 bit of glow you are taken, if not already logged on, to the general sharepoint logon page. There you need to fill in your 365 user name, which is your glow email. When leaving the username field you are then taken to the normal glow logon page when you enter your username (not you email) and password.

This is not a problem if you are already logged into glow when you click the link. It is a problem if you click in a link in your email, don’t use glow for email and may not even know what your glow email is.

For example: https://glowscotland.sharepoint.com/sites/GlowHelp/SitePages/Home.aspx will show the problem if you are not logged onto glow.

This is default behaviour of O365 and not something that can currently be altered.

Workarounds

In the glow help there is a workaround suggested:

  1. Encode the URL, using for example: URL Decoder/Encoder
  2. Add this encoded url as a parameter to this url:
    https://login.microsoftonline.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0&wp=MBI_KEY&wreply=REPLACETHIS&whr=glow.sch.uk&CBCXT=out
    This will give in our example above:
    https://login.microsoftonline.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0&wp=MBI_KEY&wreply=https%3A%2F%2Fglowscotland.sharepoint.com%2Fsites%2FGlowHelp%2FSitePages%2FHome.aspx&whr=glow.sch.uk&CBCXT=out
  3. As an extra use a URL shortening service.

The help notes that is quite a complex fix.

A better workaround

I though it might be an idea to try and make a one click solution to the workaround above. It seems to work: Simplify Glow Sharepoint links.

That page gives a field to paste in a url, it converts this to the encode url and finally shortens this using the tinyurl.com service. The example above is turned into http://tinyurl.com/om8hohs. This takes you first to the glow logon and then to the correct page.

Warning: I am not a programmer, my knowledge of JavaScript comes form google, there is a php element in the mix too, it does seem to work and after sharing it at the Glow Key Contact meeting Malcolm Wilson added it to the Falkirk glow home page.

Improvements

Apart from someone who knows what they are doing editing the script, I though one way to make it more useful would be to make a bookmarklet. This lead to a fair bit of lost time as I could not get it to work due to glow using https and my files sitting on a non secure server (here).

A wee change of tack gave me this: GlowShortLink. Drag that to your bookmarks bar. Then when you are on a page which you want to link to. click the link. It will pop open a new window with a short link.

I’ve only tested this on a mac, using Safari, Firefox and Chrome. It seem to work fine. I’ll try it out on Windows and IE next week.

And here is one using bitly: GlowBitLink.

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L0035287

Image: Double page from ‘Shinki ipputsu’ Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 2.0 from Wellcome Images.

Notes from the bookmarks I’ve made this week.

There is an awful lot of giffing going on.

I noticed:

I’ve joined in the 1840s Gif party

#walkmyworld is an interesting hash tag

Over the next ten weeks, we would like you all to share (once a week) with us a “walk” in your “world.” There really are no rules to this challenge. The only real “rule” to this challenge is that we ask that you share this publicly on Twitter, and include the hashtag (#walkmyworld) in your post.

from: The #WALKMYWORLD Project you can join in or follow the activity:
Twitter / Search – #walkmyworld

Here is my first effort on instagram.

Some Heavy Hitters

It is getting more common

For institutions to release images under Creative commons licenses. This week I bookmarked Thousands of years of visual culture made free through Wellcome Images

We are delighted to announce that over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are now freely available through Wellcome Images.

Not the easiest site to use, no embed codes for example, but another welcome(sorry) addition to a growing set of wonderful creative commons resources.

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If I Had a Hammer by derekbruff

Another post before I start the new post of ‘glow product owner’ in January. This should let me look back and think ‘how naïf’ or let other folk say, ‘but you said…’

The last post was a few thoughts on security and passwords, I used the example of a link collection and presentation as something that would not need to be password protected.

This is the sort of task that is fairly central to online learning. As a frequent task it should be one that is carried out with what the Michael Russell called ‘agile, open, best-of-breed systems’.

Collecting and Sharing Links with Glow

Here is how I would do this in the ‘old glow’ using my browser as efficiently as possible.

I am presuming that I’ve already got a glow group set up.

  1. I’d add a weblinks webpart to the page. If I’d used a weblinks list in the group before I’d create a new list (Advanced Settings->Create->Weblinks), and place that on the page.
  2. Leaving the page with the list open, I’d open a new tab and visit the page I want to link to.
  3. I’d copy the link.
  4. Return to the Glow page, click new Link
  5. Paste in the URl and write a description.
  6. Click Save and Close.

I’d repeat the process until I’d finished. At a later date if I fould a new link, I’d go back to glow, navagate to the page and add that link.

Collecting and Sharing Links with pinboard.in

I consider pinboard.in a best of breed system for collecting bookmarks, it is a service I pay for, but there are other free alternatives, for example: old timer delicious and new fangled pinterest. (I like pinboard because it is simple, text-based and cleanly designed.)

Here is one way to share a set of links with pinboard.
Visit the page you want to link to.

  1. Click the pinboard bookmarklet.
  2. Fill in a tag for the bookmark in the window that pops up.
  3. Click a button and the window closes and the the bookmark is saved.
  4. To share the links either give a link to the page for that tag on pinboard: Pinboard: bookmarks for johnjohnston tagged ‘glowscotland’
    Or add a javascript snippet to a page (old glow use the xml webpart, blogs used a widget, wikis etc have ways to add code).

Here is the last 5 links I’ve tagged glowscotland:

Comparing Systems

I might be a little unfair comparing the old glow sharepoint site with pinboard, but I think the process is the same in 365.

Glow gives the advantage of only needing one system, one username and password for both the presentation site and the saving system. A bit of research or training is needed to know how to set up a weblinks webpart. The process is a bit more labour intensive.

With pinboard you need another password. A bit of research or training would be needed to set up the account and to add the JavaScript widget to other systems. The process is very flexible, and can be adapted. It is quick to create a list of links, and much easier to edit the list or add more links to it on the fly.

Pinboard links are not behind a password they can be shared freely (or kept private). I can easily create new sets of links just by tagging. I can use pinboard links with other systems to do other things.For example: I tag comments I make with @comment those links are auto-tweeted using ifttt (yep, another system, another password). Pinboard has an API so can be incorporated into other systems easily.

Giving Choices

What I hope glow will give to learners and teachers is choices from a extensive and powerful toolkit. Some of these tools could be integrated with each other, some will have hooks to connect them up and some might just work by themselves.

The previous version of glow got bogged down by being static, and the skills need to use it were not particularly relevant in other online space. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to work on implementing Mr Russell’s vision of agile, open, best-of-breed systems.

Happy New Year!

This post is one of a few where I’ve been thinking of glow:

And a year ago I blogged: An Excellent Adventure

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Lame Encoding

Part of the setup for Radio EDUtalk consists of AutoDJ where various rotations of mp3s are automatically played on the Live shows and stream EDUtalk page. We have now got about 4GB of audio from the broadcasts and podcast. These files are uploaded to the Radio server. As we pay for storage I cycle through a few sets from time to time.
When we set this up initially it involved converting all of the mp3 files to 64kbps and mono. I posted a description of the workflow I used to do this here: Summer pt 1: Radio EDUtalk.

Since then I’ve been gathering all the audio added by simply subscribing to the Edutalk podcast in iTunes. Today I thought I’d sort out the most recent files (104 episodes had build up) and add them into the mix. The last time out I used id3tool to add tags to the audio. Unfortunately this uses a old version of id3 tags which means some of the titles are truncated. I decided to look for a new workflow.
I found ID3 Editor which has mac, windows and linux versions, costs £10 and comes with a commandline utility.

This means I can use LAME to make 64kbps mono versions of the files and then just copy the tags across from the original files. I think, in theory, I could extract the original tags with exiftool and pass them to LAME to write them to the new file, but that seems far to hard for me to work out.

So in the terminal I move into the Edutak directory and convert all files to 64 mono in new folder with:

mkdir save && for f in *.mp3; do lame -m m -b 64 --resample 44.1 "$f" ./save/"${f%.mp3}.mp3"; done

This takes a wee while, and then this copies the id3 tags:

for f in *.mp3; do /Volumes/ID3 Editor/Extras/id3edcmd -import "$f" ./save/"${f%.mp3}.mp3"; done

I have a folder full of files to upload to the server (which looks like taking a few hours).