Rescued from Fargo or littleoutliner? 1 Apr 2019 original 15 Aug 2014
First Munro for a while. Cloudy but warm, clouds mostly above munro height. 
In the Belach Bundie 4 ravens kept me entertained with a few acrobatics, croaking and making a popping sound I’d not heard before.
Hills without end.
Trying a slowshutter iphone app shot.
An Caisteal & Beinn a Chroin – an album on Flickr and 16-08-2014-An Caisteal and Beinn a Chroin. A couple of other ways to tell a walk.
Over on week 1 of P2PU Why Open? course the question is:
What do you think “openness” is? Focusing on your own field or context (if you wish), describe what it means to do work openly, or to make one’s activity or artifacts open. Alternatively, you could talk about what you think “openness” means generally, what sort of definition might fit all open activities or works.
What follows are some rather scrappy notes on my first reactions to the question. I’ve blogged a bit about openness before too.
My own field is education, I am a primary teacher now involved in staff development and ict support. To work openly means to me several things:
Apologies for the quality of the video, made in too much of a hurry.
To play openly is just as important to me, I learn about my field of interest in education, the digital, by playing. Playing in the open give me the same gains as listed above but emphasises:
I’ve a rather long post lurking in my mind about the learning I’ve being doing around GIF FIGHT!!. On the surface a rather silly game of creating gifs played among people who should know better. It turns out I’ve learned more about manipulating graphics than in numerous unfinished tutorials. In addition I’ve learned a lot about learning through play, interacting online and how I learn myself.
Open education can promote knowledge transfer while at the same time enhancing quality and sustainability, supporting social inclusion, and creating a culture of inter-institutional collaboration and sharing. In addition, open education can expand access to education, widen participation, create new opportunities for the next generation of teachers and learners and prepare them to become fully engaged digital citizens.
from: Scottish Open Education Declaration seems about right to me.
Recently I’ve been challenged a bit about the idea of open being the preferred mode of working online, I am hoping that if I stick to the Why Open? course I’ll be able t ogive less anecdotal answers.
The Whole Gang, 50 Days old by Dean Searle Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
There is some background to this project in a previous post: Glow Blogs Summer 2014.
Before the migration of the glow portal Education Scotland suggested that schools did some pruning and tidying of their glow groups to make migration easier (less data) and so that users had less to sort through and sort out on the other end.
As the date for migration of blog gets nearer a few folk have been asking me about what is going happen to their blogs, if there is anything that they should be doing and what will change. This post will try and address some of the questions.
You should not need to do any pruning and tidying of your blogs. The intention is to migrate everything as is to the new system. I was always surprised to be asked about tidying up and deleting old posts from school and class blogs. for me a blog is for life, it is a positive that I could dive back into the archive and see some of what I was doing years ago.
One of the biggest changes will be the decoupling of the blogs from the old glow groups. In the current, old, system the users and permissions of those users are set inside the glow group that the blog was created in. Those groups will go away. After migration you blog will not be able to refer to the old sharepoint group to find out who has permission do do things (view, post, carry out admin tasks) the only users it will know about are ones who have already visited the blog when logged into glow.
For example:
To avoid this scenario Teacher C would need to log on to the blog before the migration.
Japenese Spaniel by Muzik Hounds Attribution-NonCommercial License
Going forward on the blog service the user management will be in the WordPress dashboard not in glow groups. This will develop over time. We are trying to have a system that is not dependent on other parts of the system, In the old glow the blogs were very much hooked into sharepoint in a way that made it difficult to upgrade. We ended up using a very out of date version of WordPress. In the future we should be able to keep the blog system up to date.
Unfortunately the standard WordPress user management is not really suitable for use in glow. This is based round email messages to add users to a particular blog. If for example 200 second years add their teachers to their e-portfolio blogs to allow them to see them each teacher added would get an email from each blog and have to click the link in the email to finish the process. It also requires you to add one user at a time. This is not sutiable and will not happen.
For the first stage of the new blog service the developers will add functionality so that if I add a user to my blog with a particular role they will be added but the email message will not be sent and the user will not need to confirm the addition. The interface will be changes so that I can add a list of glow usernames rather than just one at a time.
The main problem in this scenario will be finding out usernames. This is being dealt with by another team in the glow program. It may not be ready in time for the switchover. In that case it may be necessary to gather usernames is a manual way (get them sent in an email, find them in O365 or even get them written down on a bit of paper. Then make a list in a document to paste into the blog admin screen, save the doc).
It is planned that the class set functionality that was present in the old glow groups will be redeveloped. The second stage for the blogs will be that the class sets service will be an area where teachers can search for a class and them copy a list of usernames to paste into the user management screen in the dashboard of their blog.
The third development will be to bring the class set functionality into the user management screen directly. This will happen in the third phase of the blog migration and upgrade.
As the functionality is developed we will be able to make user guides for this process.
Please get in touch if you have any questions about the glow blog migration.
Chain black&white by yostD7000
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
A few things from my Pinboard bookmarks from the last week.
We are a user rights initiative to rate and label website terms & privacy policies, from very good Class A to very bad Class E.
Terms of service are often too long to read, but it’s important to understand what’s in them. Your rights online depend on them. We hope that our ratings can help you get informed abour your rights.
First published on Fargo moved here 22 Jul 2019
Took a walk up to Loch Humphrey, pretty dull day and the forecast was for rain.
Lots of flowers out and I took a couple of shots using the macro lens on the iPhone. The first of meadowsweet and the second of heather.
The heather on the moor was beginning to purple up nicely.
Once I got to the loch the rain came on but not so hard I needed a jacket until I was half way to the car.
Warm Overcast with an offshore breeze.
Someone had been making a gallery of photos on the dune protection.
Rescued from Fargo 21 Jun 2021
Wednesday 24th September 2014 from 5 for 5.30pm start – 8.00pm
At the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA)
Third Floor, The Optima Building, 58 Robertson Street, Glasgow, G2 8DQ
Signup to talk or lurk at TeachMeet / TeachMeet SLF 2014
Looking forward to going to this. Edutalk is going to be one of the sponsors and we will be streaming audio live.
#tmslf14 looks like being the hashtag.
I was as usual a bit disturbed by the state of the TeachMeet Wiki front page when adding the logo, hence the slight snark in the graphic above. There have been a few attempts to improve the organisations of the wiki before and none, as far as I know, have had much success. Personally I think a front page of text links, dates, times locations and short descriptions would be nicer. Logos etc could go onto the signup page.
I wonder if the current exuberant displays of giant graphics and information could be off putting to newcomers who are thinking signing up?
One of the biggest frustrations working on the glow projects is the limits it places on open communication. I was expecting to be able to blog ideas and thoughts as I progressed through the blog migration. It turns out that this might have lead to procurement and legal difficulties.
A Very Excited Puppy by edanley Attribution License
I am delighted and excited that the blog migration project, which is what I’ve been spending the majority of my time on since January, is at a point where we can discuss our plans.
After a lot of work and investigation it has been decided that the best way to go forward with the blogging service is to continue to use WordPress for Glow Blogs. This might have seemed to be a no brainer, but we had to be sure we would not run into possible procurement challenges by assuming WordPress was the only solution.
Current blogs hooked into sharepoint, use a very old version of WordPress.
There has been a lot of investigation on how the old blogs worked and were knitted into the sharepoint system of ‘Old Glow’ we now have a good understanding of the technical architecture and best way to move forward.
Authentication, Blog Creation, User Management.
The new blogs will need to authenticate to the new RM Unify project. Blog creation is current done in the ‘Old Glow’ sharepoint portal. The new service will need to include an independent system for creating blogs. Likewise the old system used the old portal for user management, a new system will have to be created inside the WordPress platform. We anticipate that there are many opportunities for improving the blog creating and user management in the new system. We will also, hopefully avoid the problem of being tightly coupled to another service which should make future development of the blogs less problematic than it has been in the past.
We now have a full-time WordPress developer in the glow team who will have the role of overseeing the technical aspects of the blog project. We have procured the services of Code for The People to manage the migration process and upgrade to a more recent version of WordPress.
The benefits of the new blog system should become apparent quite quickly.
Firstly here are many features of more recent versions of WordPress that will improve the system without any development. A better editor, better mobile experience, better handling of media.
Going forward into stage three, there should be an opportunity for a wider range of themes and plugins and the development of a system for requesting in installation of these.
We should be able to make pupil profile improvements. For example the creation of the profile blogs current take many many steps. It takes me about an hour to take a class through creation. We should be able to improve that, and perhaps other types of blogs site, by providing a wizard that is build into the system. We have the chance to develop a better system for producing the p7 & S3 profiles.
Aggregation, this could make the following and commenting on pupil profiles by staff much more efficient. Teachers could potentially have a page where they would see any new activity by any group of pupils they interact with.
There are few possible risks which may result in extending the planned short freeze on the platform. If these push our migration date past Oct 3 the current blogs will not be accessible. Our current estimates are that we will meet our deadlines.
Class Sets, will not be ready for switchover time. RM unify does not currently have a way for the blogs to gather class and curricular groups to help with adding users to a blog and assigning them roles. We will develop interim solutions to assigning roles to multiple users (probably pasting in a list of usernames). This will hopefully be short term and be replaced by a more robust solution when class sets information is available in glow generally.
Happy Labradoodle Pup 05 by Jeremy Taylor Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC 2.0
I managed to avoid ‘blog with two tails’ as the title of this post, but could not the puppy pictures
Although this feels at times as if it is a long drawn out process, it has been (and is being) made enjoyable for me by working with (or mainly watching the the work carried out by) a great team of folk on the blog project. The first time I’ve worked with a Project Manager, Business Analyst, Technical Architect, Tester or Developers in a formal setting has been one of the best things in my secondment so far.
FutureLearn is a massive open online course (MOOC) platform founded in December 2012 as a company majority owned by the UK’s Open University. It is the first UK-led massive open online course platform, and as of October 2013 had 26 University partners and – unlike similar platforms – includes three non-university partners: the British Museum, the British Council and the British Library.
from: FutureLearn – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I’ve signed up for and started the Creative Coding course at FutureLearn. It looked like an interesting course and I was interested to try out the FutureLearn platform.
Unlike some MOOCs I’ve dipped my toe into FutureLearn is based on its own platform. FutureLearn is in beta and they are developing new features and evolving the offer. They have started with the smallest feature set that they though they could.
The webpages are extremely clear and it is easy to follow the course.
The course I am doing is split into 6 weeks.
The week view gives an overview of a number of tasks to be carried out in the week.
The colour of the wee square letting you know if you have completed the ‘task’.
Each task is laid out rather like a blog post, with content at the top and a place for participants to comment. On a wide screen computer the comments appear at the side, but on my 1280 macbook they are below.
There are already 100s of comments on most of the week one tasks.
The course encourages you to post your results to Flickr: The Monash Creative Coding Pool and to use #FLcreativecoding. The links to images can then be added in the comments. Folk are also posting images to other places, tumblr, dropbox etc.
There is a fair bit of interaction going on in the comments and quite a lot of folk helping others. I’ll be interested in seeing any signs of community growing in such a large class.
The course has been very easy to work through so far as far as organization goes. Each task is clearly set out, the videos have be of good quality and very clear. As I have been doing most of this on my commute I’ve had a few problems when the Scot Rail internet connection is poor (Falkirk!). The system works very well on a technical level. If fells like reading and responding to a series of blog posts. I am sure you could do something similar on a smaller scale with a blog. I’ll be interested to see what new features FutureLearn add as time goes on.
This has been quite good fun so far. A fairly gentle introduction to the application and some basic principles in the first week. The videos and handouts have been clear. Some of the folk taking part are obviously experienced coders and it might be a bit daunting to see some of their work others seem to be taking their very first steps in programming/coding. I’ve had enough experience with baby steps to keep me going this week. I expect I might hit a trig wall at some point I had a quick look at the khan videos suggested for getting up to speed with trig but there looked like too many to watch in a reasonable time.
The Course suggests that you need at least three hours a week to keep up, I think that would be a pretty bare minimum I am guessing I have spent five or more hours and could have done with a few more to really get the week one lessons in my head.
The course is certainly not one you could drop in and out of, it seems to be pretty linear and even in the first week you would find it hard to skip many tasks unless you already had some knowledge.
So far it has got me more interested in processing that I have been and I hope I can find the time to keep up for the next few weeks.
Here is a nice quick way to create short screencasts as animated gifs.
The one above was created because there seems to have been a change in the way you create documents in onedrive for business (ie in the MS 356 tenancy in glow).
Previously I got a dialog to name a file when I clicked +new in onedrive. Now it just created a new doc and takes you there to edit it. After saving you can rename the doc from the file list by clicking the elipse … after the doc name, but that is a bit of a fuss. It is easier to rename the doc when editing by clicking on its title.
LICEcap can capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to .GIF (for viewing in web browsers, etc) or .LCF (see below).
LICEcap is an intuitive but flexible application (for Windows and now OSX), that is designed to be
lightweight and function with high performance.
from: Cockos Incorporated | LICEcap
LICEcast is free and runs on windows and mac.
Screen-casting usually takes a fair bit of effort, sometimes using quite a complex application and needing some editing. This resulting vide may not play on different browsers or operating systems. Animated Gifs are pretty compatible. It only took me a few moments to create the one above and upload it.
