Kind: Listens

listening to audio; sometimes called a scrobble

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Listened #2 Seawilding – Scotland

On the west coast of Scotland, by the shores of Loch Craignish, a community has come together to help restore their marine environment.
When deciding on how to put something back, they identified two priority marine features they could do something about.This is a story about carbon capturing seagrass, water filtering oysters & the passionate people tirelessly working to restore both.

Really interesting listen especially about the extent of oyster beds and sea grass around the Scottish coast in fairly recent history.

In the 1790s, as many as 30 million were harvested a year from the Firth of Forth, just outside of Edinburgh.

By 1882, the Edinburgh Oyster Hall was down to just 55,000.

 

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Listened Micro Camp 2023: Miraz Jordan by @miraz from YouTube()
Take the Captain’s Chair of your Micro.Blog with the MarsEdit App for Mac: Time Travel, Replicators, Warp Speed and More. May 20, 2023.

Thanks @miraz.

I huffduffed the audio from YouTube.

This was a great session about MarsEdit. Although I don’t have a micro.blog blog, I participate in the community via WordPress, it was very relevant.

I was particularly interested in the macro buttons and ApplesScript sections.

Moray has posted her Resources for my MarsEdit presentation at Micro Camp 2023

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BBC Radio 4 – Word of Mouth, Chatbots 1

Like lots of other folk I’ve been reading plenty about Large Language Models, AI & Chatbots and playing with some of the toys.

I really liked Professor Bender’s approach and method. I also found this a very easy listen. My mind has tended to wander off when reading blogs post about AI. Very clear on the “not intelligent” and the risks associated with chatbots trained on large piles of language.

And specifically the things that they’re predicting is what would be a plausible next word given all the preceding words here and then again and then again and again.

…

And so that’s linguistically interesting that once you get to billions of words of text, there’s enough information in there just in the distribution of words to stick with things that are both grammatical and seemingly coherent.

…

So that’s a cool observation and it’s dangerous because we tend to react to grammatical, fluent, coherent, seeming text as authoritative and reliable and valuable.

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So instead of talking about automatic speech recognition, I prefer to talk about automatic transcription because that describes what we’re using it for and doesn’t attribute any cognition to the system that is doing the task for us.2

 

  1. I subscribe to the RSS feed of this BBC radio program as a podcast, pity you can’t find the feed on the webpage. ↩
  2. Ironically I used Aiko to get the text of the podcast for the quotes: “transcription is powered by OpenAI’s Whisper model running locally on your device” ↩
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Listened Feeding the People in Wartime Britain From National Kitchens to British Restaurants by Jeremy Cherfas from eatthispodcast.com
At the same time, during both World War One and World War Two, there were concerted efforts to feed people. It started with centrally cooked meals that people took home to eat, but soon blossomed into a far-reaching network of government-run restaurants.

Another really interesting episode from Jeremy Cherfas. I’d never heard of the British Restaurants that were more common in the midst of WW2 than MacDonalds are now. Where they came from, what happened in different places and the possibility of a return were all covered.

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So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love… You get the idea! If you’re anything like me you have at times questioned how much time you’ve spent trawling through social media. You may even be worried about how much data they’ve been gathering about you, or perhaps thinking about whether or not we’re even able to escape from it all. On the podcast today we’ve got Alex Kirk, and he certainly has been thinking about all of this. So much so in fact that he’s built a social network plugin for WordPress. Listen to the podcast to find out all about it…

Really interesting podcast discussing the Friends WordPress plugin with its author Alex Kirk. A lot of interesting features, including a built in RSS reader and a WordPress to WordPress social network.

I had a couple of thoughts, I wonder if this would work on a WordPress multi-site like Glow Blogs?

I also wondered if importing all these posts you were reading would bloat your own blog? This was answered in the podcast, you can set the number of posts kept or the length of time to keep them.

Alex did mention the IndieWeb, so I am wondering if there is much integration, with webmentions or bookmarking for example.

Obviously to use the social part you need friends using the plugin, but I think I’ll install it somewhere to see how it works as an RSS reader when i have a mo.

 

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Listened Michael Camilleri from Really Specific Stories
Join host and podcast studies researcher Martin Feld as he delves into stories of tech-podcast production and fandom, featuring creators and their listeners.

Listened: Really Specific Stories – Michael Camilleri, I continue to really enjoy this podcast. A podcast about podcasting and podcast listening.

Wonderfully it discusses the culture of podcasting rather than the type of mic you need. Michael‘s episode was very interesting his views on podcasting and the web had me nodding a lot.

I grabbed this wee snippet when I arrived in the car park at school the other day using Castro’s ability to snip a bit from a podcast (I am presuming such a short extract, for review, breaks no copyright).

There is a lot more to listen too, the idea of blogging, podcasting and writing html as a something done by ordinary folk, and the idea that the openness of the format invite participation certainly rings true for me.

There is quite a lot of blogging about blogging, maybe we need more podcasting about listening to podcasts & podcasting.

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Listened: OEG Voices 040: Charlie Farley and Lorna Campbell on Two Award Winning Projects from University of Edinburgh – OEG Voices a podcast produced by Open Education Global.

I huffduffed 1 this mainly to hear the voices of Alan & Lorna.

A few years ago I really hoped that the OER idea would catch on with primary & secondary teachers. Ian and I discussed this many times while working on Glow. We went to a few OER and Wikimedia events but we never got the traction to make it work.

Sharing resources for primary & secondary schools seems a very mixed bag of Facebook (I am lead to believe), the web, TES, twitter and Google Drive. The understanding of OER and creative commons amongst my colleagues is not evenly distributed yet. This is not a criticism, my knowledges of many areas I should know about is quite shaky.

I really enjoyed the listen, the work Edinburgh is doing is inspiring on all sorts of levels. I learned this included my own:

In this episode’s conversation, OER Adviser Charlie Farley shares a fabulous outreach program started in GeoSciences that has expanded to other disciplines, where students get applied open education experience working with local schools, museums, and community groups, to design and publish OERs that are shared openly through TES Resources and Open.Ed.

This has taken me to University of Edinburgh Open.Ed – Teaching Resources – Primary Science which looks as if it is full of a lot of useful resources for me and my school colleagues.

The ones I’ve downloaded so far are well badged with Open Education Resource and Creative Commons licenses. They also look like great resources.

I am fairly embarrassed not to have known about this, but quite excited I do now. I’d recommend a listen for inspiration & following the links for useful resources.

  1. Huffduffer is a wonderful service that allows you to gather audio from across the web into your own personal RSS feed. You can then subscribe to that in the app you listen to podcasts on. It also will rip youtube videos to audio and add them via huffduff-video ↩

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Uh, you know, you could imagine a history of podcasting, that evolved more just like a digital version of radio, and didn’t have this, this idea of a feed. And there are services out there, I think, trying to get back to a more controlled, like not, not a feed-based system,

I’ve been really enjoying dipping into Really Specific Stories which is about the creative practice of RSS-based tech podcasting. So far a lot of the episodes I’ve listened to have been from duel point of views as listeners & producers. I’ve found the ‘listener’ views particularly compelling.

I’ve not managed to post any notes about the episodes I’ve listened to but I’am delighted that they come with full transcripts. I mostly listen to podcasts while driving, ideas pop into my head and vanish. The transcripts let me go back and skim to be reminded.

I didn’t really need to skim this episode except to grab a quote. Daniel’s passionate arguments for RSS and publishing in the open came across very strongly. I both enjoyed and agreed with it all.

Although Really Specific Stories is about tech podcasting I think anyone with an interest in podcasting would enjoy it. I’ve listened to several episodes now and will continue to follow it.

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I listened to VR, the metaverse and education by Edtech Innovators which interviewed my pal Ian Stuart.

Apart for a little dip into Google Expeditions a few years back (eek!) I’ve not really paid much attention to VR.

Of course I’ve read a lot of tweets from Ian who is now working in the VR field, but not dug in. So I was interested to listen Ian talking on this podcast. It is well worth a listen, a quick 30 minutes.

I liked the way Ian linked VR to his previous use of technology. Ian insisted that the technology should be developed in response to classroom needs as opposed to the repurposing of business software. Ian had some nice examples of the use of VR and touched upon its use as part of project based learning.

Ian also mentioned an experience from his Islay past, when project based learning needed a fair bit of scaffolding to get off the ground.

VR does not come naturally to me. I did see how engaging it was for my class using Google cardboard back in 2016. We didn’t have the time to get past engaging to learning but Ian explained some of the ways it could be added to real learning.

Ian pointed to Eduverse The World’s First K-12 Metaverse where there is a fair bit of free content to explore even without a headset. I’ve only had a short browse in my browser, but I think I’ll see how well it runs on our iPads on the school network.

Side notes:

  • One of the things that puts me off is word Metaverse, it is so linked to Facebook I naturally balk.
  • Anchor/Spotify is a pain to winkle podcasts out of. I add episodes of show I want to listen to, as opposed to sub to the whole series, with Huffduffer, it relies on an mp3 being linked to in the episode.
  • Ian should have had a blog for all these years he has been involved in interesting things.