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Draftback is a Chrome extension that lets you play back any Google Doc’s revision history (for docs you can edit). It’s like going back in time to look over your own shoulder as you write.

from: Get Draftback to Play Back Google Docs

The above is not a video but an embed from Draftback!

Quite amazing, in the short playback above you can see how horrible a typist I am and also see Ian Stuart adding text to the document at the same time as me!

After I posted on G+ this Martian Hawksey commented with a link How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document’s keystrokes « James Somers (jsomers.net). Which give detail of the creation, a fascinating read.

The data that Google stores is, as you might expect, kind of incredible. What we actually have is not just a coarse “video” of a document — we have the complete history of every single character. Draftback is aware of this history, and assigns each character a persistent unique ID, which makes it possible to do stuff that I don’t think folks have really done to a piece of writing before.

And among explanations that go over my head things like this:

When you’re using Google Docs, you’re not actually typing into where you think you’re typing. You’re typing into a textarea in an iFrame off-screen, and through the postMessage API, those events are being sent to the “edit surface” that you see, which does stuff like draw your cursor. (Your cursor on Docs isn’t actually a cursor, it’s a 2px-wide div!)

from: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document’s keystrokes « James Somers (jsomers.net)

Would this be a useful tool in the classroom? For discussing pupil work or demonstrating writing?

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Top 10 Reasons for Students to Blog by sylviaduckworth CC-BY

I tweeted this lovely image the other day when I saw it on Classroom Blogging Options. The Glow Blogs option was not discussed 😉 but I’d hope that it would be under consideration for Scottish learners and teachers.

Saw the graphic again today along with this advice from Stephen Downes:

It has been a while since I ran a good ‘blogging in schools’ post, but the activity – and the advice – still makes as much sense today as it did in the heyday of blogging. Maybe even more sense, because unlike the early 2000s, there are many other shorter and less-structured ways students can communicate online, and blogging pulls them back into the realm of extended descriptions, arguments, explanations, and actual efforts to communicate thoughts and feelings rather than quips and reactions (or should I say, reax). Theere are many reasons to write; conveying information is just one of them. Wes Fryer also summarizes a number of the tools available as we start the 2015 fall session. Nice graphic, too.

Classroom Blogging Options (August 2015) ~ Stephen’s Web

Some great advice.

Just in time for Blogging Bootcamp #2 | Get your blogs up and running Autumn 2015 which we are starting to organise. If you want to learn a bit about classroom blogging over 5 weeks you can sign up

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Read Stop Trying To Be Creative by Christie Aschwanden
I recently finished a story I’d spent several months obsessing over. When I pitched the piece to my editor, I knew that I’d found a worthy subject, but I couldn’t quite articulate what the story was about. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the words — it’s that I didn’t have an answer yet...

Interesting read on where good ideas come from

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I’m not on holiday at the moment but taking the odd day off over the summer. Yesterday was one. I found a good set of amusing links, here are a few.

The New Devil’s Dictionary From The Verge updates Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary.

Examples:

blogger (n.): An invasive species with no natural predators.

GIF (n.): Many prefer to pronounce this word “GIF,” instead of the more controversial-sounding “GIF.”

music (n.): An art form whose medium is copyright law.

And so on.

This reminded me to google for an english translation of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, hoping as usual for a creative commons version that could be played with. As usual I didn’t find that but got In Place of Thought – The New Yorker by Teju Cole which adapts the idea for modern times:

COFFEE. Declare that it is intolerable at Starbucks. Buy it at Starbucks. EVOLUTION. Only a theory. FASCISM. Always preceded by “creeping.” FEMINISTS. Wonderful, in theory. FISH. A vegetable.

Ouch, that last one stung!

Bonus Twitter mashup

Checking Teju Cole (@tejucole) on Twitter as his ideas started as tweets, I found:

  1. He seems to have abandoned twitter and
  2. The Time of the Game, a synchronized global view of the World Cup final. Just the sort of thing I like on the web, except for the football element.

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Back in March I had a wee shot of periscope. Since then I’ve sen a few notifications pop up on my screen, but not often had the chance to watch. Often they are fairly trivial, folk at the zoo or watching traffic or just testing the app.

Today I saw this tweet:

And hit the link. Turned out it was a presentation at ‎UPEI Multidisciplinary Graduate Research Conference from a Workshop by Dr. Bonnie Stewart 1 on Becoming a Networked Scholar. Dr. Bonnie Stewart on Becoming a Networked Scholar. I watch the first 45 minutes of the broadcast from a couple of different rooms at home. A very engaging presentation on social media in Higher Education, much in my opinion directly transferable to PL in primary and secondary education. For a short while you can see the video at: Bonnie Stewart on Periscope, but I don’t think that will be around for long. After I tweeted out the fact I was watching some one asked me about the quality:

In the age of mobile we take for granted tons of things, but we now have amazing power to communicate in our pockets. For her tweets it appears Bonnie joined periscope just before she started broadcasting. It certainly didn’t take any technical expertise on my part to watch.

As I tweeted, the audio and indeed the video was very clear and synchronised. The Screenshot is slightly blurrier than average. The projector screen was not to clear, but the whole thing was very watchable. NB. bonnie’s slides are up here: Becoming a Networked Scholar.

I was supposed to be going to the post office but delayed as long as possible, I am pretty sure that the stream would hold up on 3 or 4g but unfortunately the audio is cut off when the lock screen is on. That might be an improvement for periscope or my audio bias showing.

This has certainly given me the idea that you can broadcast with periscope with a deal of confidence and make a good fist of it without a lot of prep. I guess if you wanted someone could screen capture the video. Looks like it might be a useful TeachMeet tool, classroom use would have to be though about carefully, but it could certainly be used to bring video into a classroom simply. With more and more primary classes using twitter it doesn’t seem much of a jump to use a teacher’s phone to project onto a screen or, network allowing, to watch on a desktop.

1. Bonnie and her students were central to one of my favourite Raido #EDUtalk broadcasts, Radio #EDUtalk 06-03-2014: #ed473 ‘Considering networked communications for educators’ | EDUtalk ↩

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How to achieve monkey mind | The Daily Stillness Today you get to find a quiet spot and read this Medium article by Sarah Buttenwieser. A 4 minute read how can you not have 4 minutes to invest in your well being? Well, it may be 10 after you do your task: select from the article and/or add to it and make your very own list on how to achieve monkey mind. You will smile and also remind yourself that you do already know ehow to achieve stillness – do the opposite of one item in your list each day! Tell us what is in your list?

The linked article gave me a good few smiles.

  • Wake up in the middle of the night, worry about lack of sleep.

  • Check blood pressure, wondering what effect checking blood pressure has on blood pressure.
  • Bookmark and tag articles to learn from, reorganise said bookmarks.
  • Fill your devices with PDFs on learning JavaScript. Never read them but think about them often.
  • Automate things don’t look at end result. Occasionally recall you have automated something.
  • Distract yourself by making lists.

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View from Ben Chaluim. Green hills and a cloudy sky.

My wish, my encouragement is just taking these ten second breaks. OK. You know. You know I can’t carve out a regular meditation practice every day and every morning, but ten seconds? Can you carve out ten seconds? And just do it, you know. You know when you’re going to work or something, you come
downstairs and you go to open the door. You stop. Particularly in doorways and other thresholds where the tendency is to rush through… what is happening to my feet, shoulders back, ten seconds, breathing out. Where am I? How am I? Where am I going? There does not even really have to be an answer, it’s just this touching the earth. Touching the earth.

Ajahn Sucitto

I guess this exercise is supposed to help with a busy working life, I tried it today far from work off in the hills.

Often when walking alone in the quite of the hills, I think over work, wonder about ideas, remember past sadness and even tell my self stories about walking.

This exercise, seems to physically open my view, expand the horizons and create quiet.

The sensation fades pretty quickly too but I’ll repeat the exercise in different places and see what happens. If it works when I am puffing up a slope it might work in the middle of town or work.