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A timely idea arrives from several directions. Podcasts I listen to.

I listen to podcast pretty exclusively when commuting. I am in the car nearly a couple of hours a day. I seldom listen elsewhere. If I am on foot I prefer to listen to what is around me. At home I listen to music when cooking.

Here are some regulars.

The BBC

I wish the BBC and everyone else made it simpler to find RSS feeds.

Tech

  • I listen to Core Init, by Manton and Daniel it is aimed at Mac developers, but often strays onto blogging, AI and other interesting topics.
  • More Mac: ATP & The Talk Show, I don’t listen to all of the episodes but catch up with one occasionally.
  • WordPress briefing. Seems to have dried up as the host moved out of a role at WordPress.

Other

Recent additions

Huffduffer

I like to listen to odd episodes of podcasts without subscribing. Huffduffer created a RSS feed from audio on webpages. I mourn the passing of Huffduffer-video which let you add YouTube and other media to your huffduff feed as audio. Using the huffduffer bookmarklet is interesting. Increasingly some podcast hide links to audio files. This leads to some tedious workarounds. (Find the rss link, open that in Firefox and copy the episode audio url).

John Johnston on Huffduffer is what I’ve huffduffed.

Castro Sideloads

The app I use to listen to podcasts has a few nice features. You can just drop an mp3 into an iCloud folder and it appears in the app. Better still you can use an app extension to get audio from a webpage or rip a YouTube to audio. I hope that it will replace huffduff-video for me for video.

For what it is worth here in my Castro opml export and some of them as html. The html has links to the site and RSS1.

Many of the feeds in my opml are no longer being updated. Some I subscribed to long after they existed. Castros’s triage system, allowing you to build a play order from feeds is very handy for this.

  1. My horrible combination of google sheets and bash didn’t manage to convert them all. Castro’s opml export didn’t have links to the sites, just the RSS. ↩︎
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Read The Overstory by Richard Powers ★★★★☆ 📚
Several different stories & ideas around the importance of trees to the world weave together. Some resonated with me more than others.
Many of the ideas are better known now than when the book was published.

The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story

This is a good story, it might change part of your mind, unfortunately like everything else it is more complicated.

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Listened to: Better Diets for all

And yet, the vast majority of people do not eat within dietary guidelines. If anything, diets — and with them health — are getting worse in many places. What’s the problem? Maybe, it is that the people who devise the policies are too far away from the lives of the people they’re trying to help.

This explanation for why people allow their children to eat poorly resonated. It could also apply to other parenting behaviour, eg. mobile phone use. I’ve sometimes wondered at the food & sweets parents provide. The podcast nails why it is not so simple.

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As usual I’ve stitched up all the photos I’ve posted to flickr this year into a video.

I’ve uploaded to Vimeo this year as YouTube has been giving me random messages about having to login on embedded videos. This even when I’ve logged in on youtube.

I also had a bit of bother with the script as I got a few forbidden noticed. I fixed it by adding a user agent to the curl part and then by changing the url to the downloaded one.

Music: Morning Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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The Advent calendar in Glow Blogs has now 15 wee activities for mid-upper primary. 5 minutes of Christmas fun or a brain break for each day. New ones appear at 1 minute past midnight.

I have learnt a bit about the Site Editor when making the Calendar page. I used the new, to Glow, Grid Block. Each grid contains a group with a display post shortcode. The Display posts plugin allows me to show a thumbnail for the post published on a particular day. If there are no posts it just shows text of my choice. In this case ‘wait for the date’. The posts are queued up by scheduling.

There is an Advent Calendar in H5P itself, but I like the display post approach.

Each post has a simple H5P activity. Matching games, quizzes and the like.The Site Editor in Glow blogs is a really powerful tool for creating different looks. I’ve enjoyed testing the cover block a bit this weekend.

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Listened to: Learning Conversations Artificial Intelligence with Ollie Bray | Education Scotland podcast

This is the first Education Scotland podcast episode I’ve listened to. Solid food for thought. I’ve not developed any really solid ideas around AI in education but this helped me think of some questions. Ollie compared the uptake and development to AI to other technologies:

So the take up rate of generative AI, like ChatGTP, has been far quicker than people signing up to Facebook, you know, people adopting the internet, people getting a television, people getting radio, etc.

There was discussion of some ways that AI is already being used in schools including what Ollie described as lots of schools doing really, really good work around the ethics of AI.

I wonder what aspects of ethics are being discussed? The one I’ve thought of most is already out of the stable. All the material scraped by AI before we got a chance to choose. I’m not particularly worried about anything I put online being gobbled up by AI, but I imagine it would be more of concern for artists and writers who earn a living from content?

I think we also need to consider the ethics of all application & services we use in education. Especially when application make educational design decisions or have unethical behaviour1.

An interesting point was around developing AI to recreate traditional methods of education, but arguably in more efficient way. Ollie thinks that is probably missing how do we use the technology to do things that were unimaginable before?

I’ve read a bit about using AI in schools for report writing, analysing pupil data and the like and seen a few educational AI startups offering that sort of service. Most of the teachers I’ve talked to, like myself, have used it in a very basic way, cutting down some time in making a quiz or other classroom resources. We are just using ChartGPT, Copilot. etc in as fairly simplistic way.

The podcast talked about the need to update the Scottish Government’s technologies for learning strategy mentioning that it would take 10 years to bring this to publication. I can see a bit of a mismatch with the speed that technology is developing, especially AI. Can we plan that far ahead?

I used the AI application Aiko to generate the transcript to get the quotes.

  1. Thinking about X/Twitter, see Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot | The Guardian should we be using X with learners or at all given Mr Musk’s reinstatement of horrors & obliging censorship of government critics? ↩︎