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illustration from Curtis's botanical magazine

I’ve been interested in the Garden versus Stream discussion around creating web content. Some of the sites I’ve work most on have be gardens made with stream technology 1.

Since I’ve installed the Posted Today plugin I often look back over previous posts. This leads to some tidying up, and fixing of links, formatting, adding tags and the like.

This feels very like pruning, staking and generally tidying up.  Behaviour that is usually associated with gardening. My blog is mostly for myself 2. I feel like I am regularly pottering around, joining dots and revisiting old thoughts.

An example: A while ago it was the 10th anniversary of my post Field Recording at the Scottish Music Centre. It is now full of broken links. Some, Flash soundcloud players, I was able to fix, replacing the old flash players. Some were just gone to 404. Of these some I could add archive links. I didn’t fix everything because I got a bit distracted with all the links I followed to check. Many rabbits holes.

I am not making a huge effort in this, I find it valuable to read my old posts and if I have a moment do a little gardening cleaning up my stream.

Featured image: n3_w1150 | Curtis’s botanical magazine.. London ; New York [… | Flickr Public Domain

  1. Glow Blog Help ↩
  2. Certainly my stats strongly suggests this;-) ↩
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Replied to One Simple Practice I Will Continue Post-Pandemic. (THE TEMPERED RADICAL)
Like many teachers who have spent the past year teaching virtually, I have had to get used to one sad reality: My eighth grade students rarely turn their cameras on — and very few are willing…

Hi Bill,
This is really interesting. I teach younger kids, primary 6-7 age 9-12 but I saw a gradual spread of turned of camera and lack of audio from my class over our second lockdown at the start of the year. As I was using teams, I used the text chat and got a lot more responses and considered ones using that.
Interestingly some of my class were in school, essential workers kids, there were a lot more vocal I presume because they were sitting in a room together and gained confidence from that.
I do occasionally use online responses in class and I’ll be thinking of easy ways to incorporate that in the future.

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Somewhere or other1 I Saw a link to v.2 (1799) – The Naturalist’s Pocket Magazine or compleat cabinet of the curiosities and beauties of nature. Intriguing enough which lead me to discover the Biodiversity Heritage Library:

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL is revolutionizing global research by providing free, worldwide access to knowledge about life on Earth.

About BHL – Information about the Biodiversity Heritage Library

There seems to be a vast collection of biological books that are free to read and download. There is also a twitter account, @BioDivLibrar and an amazing Flickr account: Biodiversity Heritage Library where there are over a quarter of a million images, many public domain. They have also contributed

over 2 million BHL images have been uploaded to the IA Book Images Flickr stream as part of the Art of Life project. These images are identified and uploaded in bulk using an algorithm. They offer a great opportunity for serendipitous discovery via browsing.

from: About Biodiversity Heritage Library | Flickr.

The Library are asking for people to help tag their flickr images and this might be a good activity for secondary pupils?

Bird Bingo


As a primary teacher, once I’d stopped just raking through some beautiful images I knocked up a quick Bird Bingo game for my class to help with bird identification. It has random cards and a caller.

There is page after page of beautiful pictures in the photo stream I defy anyone to leave it quickly. Example page 2094!

Featured Image: n456_w1150 | Natural history of the animal kingdom for the u… | Flickr public domain.

1. I don’t like not being able to attribute where I found this amazing resource.↩
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Liked Soft fascination (richardcoyne.com)
My ability to concentrate on any task is limited, no matter how much I enjoy that task. Eventually I reach a point where my performance is severely hampered, things take longer than usual, and I make mistakes, become inefficient, less creative, and easily distracted. Sound familiar? Tangle of bare b...

Fascinating post on fascination. It proposes that Soft Fascination will restore out concentration and that this is facilitated by being in nature. I certainly feel it can be easy to become absorbed in the natural world. I was also pleased to read

On the contrary, smartphones may help us get out more, adding to a sense of safety, GPS means you can explore more, there are countless information sources and apps about the outdoors, and there’s the full set of UK Ordnance Survey maps available for download on a GPS enabled app. Photography provides a means of exercising soft fascination and probing the world. There’s a sense in which the great outdoors and what we get out of it is already mediated by decades worth of technology, not to mention presentations via art and the mass media.

I’ve  found my phone a useful tool for navigating the natural world,  not only as a method of finding where I am but of recording that and identifying my surroundings and neighbours. Trails, PlantNet and PeakFinder Are some of my favourites along with the camera and an audio recorder.

hat tip @livedtime