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I’ve made a updates to a couple of simple web pages/apps aimed at pupils and teachers using iOS and images.

Photoblitzer

photoblitzer is a really simple page that just gives a list of ideas for taking photos. I originally made it for a #ds106 project (20 Minute Photo Challenge: ds106 Photoblitz – CogDogBlog) and blogged about it on my 106 blog 106 drop in – Photoblitzin.

Since then I’ve used it as a starting activity on a couple of iPad training courses for staff and it worked well.

Originally I was thinking of this as being used on an iphone or ipod touch, but we have seen a lot of schools buying iPads and running a fair number of training twilights on useing these so I updated the app to look a bit better on an iPad:

Staying the same on an iphone or ipod touch:

The idea of the app is to generate a list of ideas for taking photos from a list of over 106 and let people mark them off as they take them. This seems to get people started in thinking about making interesting photos even in the rather limited places we run training courses in. This leads in turn to more interesting possibilities later when working with application to use the photos, say SonicPics, comic makers, iMovie and the like.

FlickrStampr

After I had played with photoblitzer I though I’d do the same sort of thing for FlickrStampr ( a new slightly catchier name for flickrcctouch). I made this way back when I first looked into using iPod Touches in class and neglected it after that.

The idea behind FlickrStampr is to give pupils an easy way to use creative commons images with the required attribution. The app lets the user search for flickr photos by tag. and provides a set of thumbnails. Clicking on a thumbnail creates (on the server, a copy of the image with a strip at the bottom with a simple attribution text. The means the user can download the image and use it on blog posts or presentations and the attribution is on the image, easier, I hope, for pupils than copying both the image and the attribution and then useing them together.

I started by cleaning up the iPhone interface a wee bit, before it did a fair amount of hiding and showing, now it just shows everything: flickrstamper iphone I messed about with the CSS a little and the page looks a bit different on an iPad screen; FlickrStampr iPad The main problem with the interface as it stands is that if you want to just see a bigger version of the image the image is processed on the server adding the text. This is, I suspect, a little inefficient but it makes for ease of use: you don’t need to preview them click a create button, then download the result. Just press the ‘preview’ and choose save. 

Not exactly responsive

The design improvements falls quite short of what is normarly thought of as responsive. In FlickrStampr the layout just squishes as the screen gets smaller, pushing one secion below the other. I photoblitzer I’ve used a media query in the css for the first time: @media screen and (max-width: 480px) there are a lot of possibilities for improvment. I am slowly learning hopefully more improvements to come.

Icons

I’ve now given both an icon to make it look a bit nicer when added as a bookmark on your homescreen, Ive also use a useful bit of javascript that alerts folk to the fact they can do this:Add to home screen, you can see it in action on some of the screenshots above. iOS web apps are a lot less powerful that native apps, especially ones developed by peole like myself with pretty limited knowledge, but they do offer the possibility of simply addressing niche uses. I hope that some folk will find these things of interest or even useful. I’ve had a ton of fun working/playing with this stuff and am open to suggestions for improvments.

The value of free

As an aside, testing the flickr API, and some recent play with the freesound API reniforce for me the value of sharing under a CC license with the proviSion of a powerful API, there are some amazing people sharing wonderful captures and creations freely, this need to be vslued, used and protected.

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A decade ago, metadata was all the rage among the geeks. You could tag, geo-tag, or machine-tag Flickr photos. Flickr is from the old community. That’s why you can still do Creative Commons searches at Flickr. But you can’t on Instagram. They don’t care about metadata. From an end-user point of view, RSS is out of favor. The new companies are not investing in creating metadata to make their work discoverable and shareable.

from: Joho the Blog – [berkman] Anil Dash on “The Web We Lost”

Some great reading this morning starting at How the Web is being body-snatched ~ Stephen’s Web through Doc Searls Weblog – How the Web is being body-snatched to the post with the above quote.

This quote really jumped out at me, I’ve loved the flickr API for a long time and used it for lots of fun. I enjoy Instagram too, for its easy, quick hit, and lightweight community.

I really hope that we are not drifting away from such valuable resources with apis and rss feeds to the easy and locked in.

One of the things that makes the huge gap between sites like flickr and facebook is who has access to data and how they access it. When you share on flickr you are doing something quite different, and potentially much more valuable than sharing on facebook or google+.

I hope that open never gets old.

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Newspaper dog thinking RSS by stylianosm Attribution License

Over the last few days I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts about the passing of Google Reader. Although it has been apparent for a while that google was not really interested in reader I was very upset to hear this. Google Reader has become central to my use of the Internet.

RSS

RSS stands for, in one interpretation, for Really Simple Syndication.  This is the definition that describes it use to me. The power comes from the simplicity. RSS give you a way to read a sequential website; blog, YouTube users activity, Flickr stream, delicious links and many more is a standard format that is simple to read. This allows you to display the latest posts of one blog on another, aggregate videos from YouTube with a particular tag with blog post, delicious links etc all in the one place.

It also allows developers to create Feed Readers that will list and organise multiple blogs allowing you to read them in the one place and keep track of what you have read. Most readers will also allow you to export or share information with ease to a vast array of different services.

I first stared using RSS not long after I got my own mac and became interested in ict. In those dialup days I got new software from magazine cover disks and I installed NetNewsWire light a desktop aggregator. This I used on and off but did not really pay much attention until the first flowering of educational blogging in Scotland and the birth of TeachMeet. It then became fairly obvious that you could pull in valuable information about events to one place automatically. At that time  Technorati did a pretty good job of aggregating blogs posts, you could pull together delicious links, Flickr photos and posts with the same tag, say teachmeet06, with a pretty minimal knowledge of php. You could also do the same thing with various online aggregators, netvibes for example, with a bit less hassle or fun.

Syncing

One of the features of Feed Readers that I didn’t get at first was the ability to sync your reading. I only read RSS feeds on my home computer, I only owned one device. It was not useful to me.

Mobile

With the rise of mobile computing and my first iPhone the ability to sync became very useful to me. On the train I could pull out my phone and skim through my feeds, I didn’t do a lot of reading of long posts but marked, linked, instapapered, and even emailed then for later consumption.

Around this time google reader became the syncing solution of choice for the vast majority of Feed readers both desktop and mobile. This made a lot of sense; no matter where I read my feeds, on any device and on different applications on the same device everything was kept in sync. This made it easy to test a variety of applications, catch up on the web on any computer all with the help of Google Reader.

All your Eggs belong to Google

The obvious flaw in the ointment. Like posterous, you get what you pay for. Some folk argue the google did RSS and us a disservice, we did not see development of different solutions as it is hard to compete against free.

Some folk didn’t like feed readers anyway

Quite a few folk reacted to google reade going way with so what:

‘Oh no, Google Reader is gone! Whatever shall I do?’ Get a life;-)

from: @kvnmcl on Twitter

Dave Winer who had a lot to do with the creation of RSS famously does not like readers, preferring a river of news, tabs.mediahackers.org. There are lot of good things about a stream of new, Dave’s solution is self hosted, Dropbox even, so does not relay on google or anyone else. I’ve set it up a few times, I guess it would be better for someone who reads their feeds regularly, throughout the day, as part of their job. I think reading lots of blogs is good for me professionally but do it in my own (usually breakfast on an iPad) time.

Similarly many people get links from twitter, this for me is a bit haphazard, I also mostly follow education folk on twitter, my feed reader has a wider range of odd blogs which can be useful.

Google Plus

Many folk are suggesting that google has shut reader down in part to encourage the use of google plus. I have a problem with this. As it stands google plus is hard to share out of. In most of the RSS readers I use it is simple to favourite a post, share it to many other services, bookmark it etc. Google plus does not help with this. I recently found that ‘plus oneing’  other folks google plus posts in google plus communities does not save that any where I can find it! I can’t see a way to share or bookmark links to google plus content with any sort of ease. There is not feed or API in google plus that allows me to extract and auto share content. I am beginning to see G+ as a longer twitter with even more opaque content.

What I’d like

There are a plethora of solutions being thrown up in response to google reader shutting down. This is what I’d like to see:

    • A reader that stores it’s sync data in a open and standardised form. This would allow for the testing of or swapping between different client applications.

 

  • A reader that allows the easy sharing, collection and organisation of data.

 

 

The Bright Side

I guess there will be plenty of activity around replacing and improving on Google Reader over the next few months. I am looking forward to doing some testing of the different applications and systems and finding out what fits for me.

What I’ve been reading (mostly on Google reader)

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Iosicons

The other day a colleague and I were trying to remember how to get the icon art for iOS apps to help write notes. We though we remembered a way to get them out from examining the package. Later I was reading the ADE list, where there was a bit of bemoaning that you can no longer copy the art from iTunes. Someone mentioned that the art was now is a file iTunesArtwork inside the .ipa files in the iTunes folder, the .ipa file being zip files.

Icon Extraction Manual

This means you can get the art work by, changing the extension on an ios app file to .zip, expanding the archive, adding a .png extension to the iTunesArtwork file. You end up with the artwork png file.

Automating

This seems like a fairly long road for a short cut. A wee bit of though lead me to try a few shell scripts. Basically you can use the unzip command to extract the iTunesArtwork file with a png extension and you get a png file of the artwork.

To make this a little easier I wrapped up the shell script in an AppleScript. Drag a bunch of .ipa files onto the droplet and it will create a folder on your desktop and extract the art work as png files. Double click the droplet and it will prompt you for a file and do the same. The files are named the same as the .ipa files except I replace all non alphanumerical characters with an underscore. I’ve put the script in my dropbox in case anyone would find it useful, and uploaded the text so you can View the Script.

BTW: Rounded Corners

So the artwork extracted does not have the rounded corners:

I Movie 140.ipa

You can change the way that looks on the web with a bit of css:
I Movie 140.ipa

style="-moz-border-radius: 20%;-webkit-border-radius: 20%;border-radius: 20%;"

This might help other folk documenting iOS stuff. I’ve now got a folder of >600 icons ready to go.

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Grain Tower by Alan Denney Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

At work we have an occasionally used glow blog, ICT. I am trying to post there more regularly. This week I used to to post a couple of sets of useful links.

iPad Sharing

We have been running a lot of ipad twilights, mostly introductions, but some on digital storytelling. Last week we had a couple were we invited staff along to share what they were doing with iPads in class. This generated a lot of interesting conversation, short demos and links. I’ve collected the links: iPad Sharing.

Finding Digital Media to Re-Use

We shared this links on an iBooks Author course and the digital storytelling with iPads one. Finding Digital Media to Re-Use hopefully helping folk to talk about copyright, attribution and avoiding the quick google search as a way of getting images for presentations etc.

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Composition: manhole and chain by 10b travelling
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

Why you should learn to code

Primarily you should do it because you love it, because it’s fun — because it’s wonderful to create machines with your mind. Hugely empowering. Emotionally gratifying. Software is math-in-motion. It’s a miracle of the mind. And if you can do it, really well, there’s absolutely nothing like it.

from: Thread: Why you should learn to code by Dave Winer We seen lots of arguments about why kids should learn to code recently this is to my mind the best. I could not describe myself as a programmer but I’ve tinkered with various things in a amateur way for years and had a ton of fun. Some interesting comments on this one.

How you Should learn to code?

LiveCode is like a next generation version of HyperCard. It is used to create #1 one app store apps, real-time flight booking systems and control satellites. It is used to create simple one off apps and utilities to solve day-to-day problems.

from: Next Generation LiveCode (Open Source) by RunRev Ltd — Kickstarter RunRev, Edinburgh based, had a kickstarter project to opensource their programming environment, this project successfully raised its funding goal (I backed it). You will soon be able to download an opensource version to use on non commercial projects.

Future Glow

Mr Russell, it is timeto form the agile group to start moving things forward. The technologists within ScottishEducation are some of the most passionate practitioners you will ever meet withinternational reputations and growing global experience. We will continue tosupport and advise when we are asked – but you need to ask and wewill always be honest.

Unfortunately it is ourhonesty that scares some of the bureaucrats who work within our system,

These are exciting timesfor Scottish Education and Technology for Learning, but I hope we can now startto move forward together and not in isolated silos of innovation.

from: OllieBray.com: Scotland’s Technology for Learning: A Tipping Point by far the best thing I’ve read about glow, if you are a Scottish educator please read this now. If you are Mike Russell please do this now!

Why I love DS106

Rust on rust, as a metaphor doesn’t really get me far, in fact, in explaining myself, so I’ve decided to switch metaphors yet again, and talk using a cooking metaphor.

[That should help to make the purpose of this post even clearer.  (Least you wonder too much, this is a digitally-told story, after all, about computer stuff and coding, and framed with a historical reference to a truly great science-fiction TV show and some geeky characters, and built around ds106radio, so indulge me …)]

from: My Kung Fu has Rust on Its Rust | de•tri•tus I got a mention in this post but that is not why I love it and ds106

Good News

Good news for audio on the web: the latest nightly builds of Firefox on Windows 7 have H.264 and MP3 support enabled by default! Work is ongoing to bring these features to the Mac OS X and Linux versions.

from: Firefox on Windows 7 gets H.264 and MP3 support – HTML5 Audio great news for folk interested in simplifying the playing of media on the web.

Five Bucks or £2.99

Think about this — for five bucks, Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPhone can do more than the Mac desktop version of Photoshop 3.0 which cost hundreds. I still have those floppies.

from: Photo App Review: Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPhone » Life In LoFi: iPhoneography mobile apps are interesting in that they bring a lot of power to users very cheaply.

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Coding john

Even though it was expected I was pretty dismayed when posterous announced that it was shutting down.

Last week I blogged about possible ways forward and as I did so a couple of possible solutions appeared:

  1. Posthaven is the safe place for all your posts forever from some of the development team at posterous a site that will incorporate the best of posterous for $5 a month with a promise to keep going.
  2. Then Tim Owens (timmmmyboy) on Twitter offered us a home at Hippie Hosting where ewe could use WordPress.

So I’ve reserved edutalk on www.posthaven.com for $5 as a possibility, but the temptation to play is too much:

The idea now is to test out WordPress and keep posthaven as a fallback or perhaps as a way of contributing. The rest of this post will briefly cover what I did last weekend to test a few things out and start developing the idea.

So far:

  • I downloaded my own posterous backup from ‘John’s posterous – I always did like sending email‘ and set up a new wordpress blog, After Posterous, to see how that would go.
    Mixed results, the posts and comments showed up, but I lost the nice galleries, I’d have to go through the 300+ posts and set up WP galleries by hand.
  • I installed wp on hippy hosting, I used the system there, can’t recall the name, to install wordpress and it was done in seconds. I’ve normally have done this using ftp. Slightly worrying that this is so easy.
  • I got a new domain as a place holder: http://www.edutalk.info while developing the new site.
  • I added the FeedWordPress plugin and set it up to auto import boos tagged edutalk. This worked really well. pulling in all the boos in the RSS feed very quickly and treating them well. Linking the audio and creating the enclosures for podcasting. I am delighted with this.
  • The boos are posted tagged audioboo, it looks like I might have to think about the formatting a little bit.
  • I downloaded the posterous back up for SLFtalk – Audio publishing by attendees at the Scottish Learning Festival to have a look at the format, it seems less daunting that the 2GB edutalk backup.
    I’ve now got something to worry about. For some reason posterous have decided that there backups don’t link audio properly:

    What about audio?
    The Posterous export file doesn’t currently provide links to audio files, so there’s not a way for us to import them automatically. If you have audio files, you’ll need to find them in the “audio” folder within the backup zip file and manually upload them to the relevant posts.


    from: Import from Posterous — Support — WordPress.com
    This is going to be tricky given the number of posts we have.

Thinking about

  • It looks like to get the posts with audio up I’ll have to do something automatic. I’d need to, say: parse the posterous backup, to extract information; identify associated audio files; upload the audio, probably by ftp; create the information needed for a post (including enclosure info) and create the post, probably with the MetaWebLogAPI. The problem will be that the posts will vary depending on the source, audioboo, email, directly through the web. Some posts have audio that was uploaded to posterous, some link to audioboo. I hope to cobble a solution to this with SuperCard, AppleScript and string.
  • I’ll try to get enclosures showing up in posts as audio players, hopefully html 5 with fall back for older browsers and ones that do not support mp3. I think I saw a snippet of php for that somewhere in the wordpress help.
  • I am wondering how the change from the test domain, edutalk.info to edutalk.cc will go, will I have to fix all the urls for enclosures in the wordpress database? Anyone know if this is easy?
  • I’ve no idea how to handle submission via email. Posterous did a great job of this, especially dealing with different filetypes.

Luckily there is a couple of months to get this sorted…

image idea from here

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looking for doug
looking for doug

On Monday evening I joined Doug Belshaw’s etmooc session on Digital Literacies. It was an interesting session, Doug spoke mostly to his thesis What is ‘digital literacy’ and a lovely set of slides T3S1: Digital Literacies with Dr. Doug Belshaw. Doug has archived, video and audio on the Internet Archive. I’ve added my audio recording to the Unofficial ETMOOC RIPCast where I’c collected some of the sessions I’ve attended and some I’ve missed.

Doug took participants though some exercises in thinking about digital literacies working in a ether pad and in the blackboard session. I guess you needed a degree of digital literacy to keep up with it.

Like Doug I do not believe in the idea of a digital native but am fascinated by how folk learn to read and write (watch, create, listen to etc) using digital tech. I believe that I’ve a reasonable degree of web literacy .

This belief was challenged a bit as I watched folk start to define and redefine digital Literacies. It confirmed my suspicion that although I am somewhat digitally literate, I could not define what I mean by this. After the meet I still cannot. This reminds me of a quote, that I can’t quite recall or source, to the effect that a speaker of a language may not be able to make any true statement about that language.

Fun

One factor in, if not measuring digital literacy, is a indicator, is the ability to be able to have fun in the language. Make jokes, puns, poetry and be relaxed when using it.

Playing with John on Marratech

I recall, a few years ago(2007), a few Scottish Educators had join in using using Marritech for the first time. We were all, for that time, experienced users of ICT in the classroom , none of us knew what we were doing. All you could hear were gales of laughter as we explored the tools, whiteboard slides and the like making a ton of mistakes.
This feeling of relaxed fun was quite different from the experience of watch many teaching professional using ict. I am not sure how we move folk into this experience other than by modelling it when possible.

Web Literacies

Towards the end of the session Doug explained his current work focuses on the more manageable task of creating a standard for web literacy. Learning/WebLiteracyStandard – MozillaWiki.

This is very interesting stuff, and although I am sure that the grid Doug has produced, see Mozilla Web Literacies White Paper (v0.8) – Google Drive could be argued with it provides a great structure for thinking around the subject.

All in all this episode of #ETMOOC has got me thinking far more than I’ve time to organise in a blog post. I’d love to see helping pupils become confident webmakers become part of mainstream education.

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Woke up this morning to a barrage of tweets about Posterous turning off on April 30.

We use posterous for EDUtalk and I have a few other posterous blogs too.

This is not too unexpected, I bloged about it a couple of times, Posterous Worries and More Posterous Worries but it is still disappointing, who doesn’t like great stuff for free.

I’ve blogged enough about how good posterous is and the features that make it great for EDUtalk. I am going to make a list here of what is needed with some possible solutions and hopefully get some feedback.

  • Cost, posterous is free. I am not opposed to paying for stuff on the web, I pay for hosting here and elsewhere, the icecast part of Radio EDUtalk, flickr, pinboard and other stuff but we don’t want to pay too much for EDUtalk.
  • Space, last year at some point I downloaded everything from EDUtalk (There is a mac app for that) and it was well over 1GB then, there are >1000 posts. We need to move to a flexible hosting, or to use the Internet Archive for hosting our larger files.
  • Upload size, posterous allows upload of fairly large audio files through a browser. Other options may mean ftp, not a hugh problem but.
  • Media handling, folk can email in all sort of audio to edutalk and posterous deals with it and displays it nicely.
  • Open posting by email, I’ve not seen this else where, folk can email an audio file to EDUtalk and it is posted to the moderation queue, this makes for a very easy entry to podcasting, covering events by lots of folk easy, My favourite feature about posterous.
  • The Posterous API, recently broken, this allowed us easily to pull in audioBoos and ipadio phlogs. The MetaWeblogAPI or the FeedWordpress plugin (not sure how it handles attachments) would let us do this with WordPress.

From my knowledge and experience the simplest fit would be self hosted WordPress, ftp upload of Radio EDUtalk episodes (either to the sit or to the Internet Archive), forget the submission via email, or do this manually. Use the MetaWebLogAPI or FeedWordpress to bring in other content.

An Opportunity?

I’d like better, I’d love to keep all the features of EDUtalk and even get back the old phone in feature (that used to be handled by gabcast). I’ve also got some interest in using something else from the ubiquitous wordPress (ironic since I’ve spent a ton of time arguing for WP in Glow recently).

I wonder too how well the various WordPress posterous import solutions would handle our content, for example some of our ipadio and audioboos use the players from these sites, some use just a lonk that posterous turned into a posterous player and most recently we have been downloading and reposting the files to fix a feedburner/audioboo problem!

I’d love to hear some ideas of the best way to move this forward.

Update: just see this: Posthaven is the safe place for all your posts forever

When will Posthaven be able to do _______?

Everything you expected and liked about Posterous will eventually be in Posthaven. Things like post by email, multiple users, pages and links, full HTML theming, and the bookmarklet.

We’ll deploy the features and let you know as soon as they’re available.

from: Posthaven is the safe place for all your posts forever

I’ve reserved edutalk on www.posthaven.com for $5 as a possibility.

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As part of etmooc we are encouraged to use a variety of Storytelling tools. I’ve spent a fair bit of time over the last couple of days animating gifs but though it was time to step out of my comfort zone.

I decided to choose something from 50+Ways – Tools A to Z @cogdogs wiki of online storytelling tools.

My problem was twofold, I need to decide what tool to use and what story to tell. Time for avoidance tactics, a bit of light coding, to come up with a way to choose a way.

I ended up with Which Way? a simple page that will give you a randomised choice from the 50 Ways list.

Still without a story I decided to use one of the tools to explain what I’ve done, a couple of click gave me VoiceThread. I am not sure if it ois the best tool for this particular job but it is quick and simple to use, a bunch of screen shots and a mic.