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Today, print the article, find a path, walk it and then sit down to enjoy the article after your walk.

The walk round Ardinning today was transformed by the snow. The last time I was here is was damp and boggy. Much better walking today with the ground frozen under the new snow. The odd slippy bit.

The snow brings the attention closer. Shapes are smoothed out and detail emphasised. Sounds are muffled and amplified at the same time. Detail of a nearby hill looms out of the white making it hard to judge the distance. Falling snow seems to reflect the landscape into the sky.

I didn’t print the linked passage, but read it with Reader View which cuts back distraction.

It seems fairly familiar ground to me, I’ve long thought walking as important in lots of ways. I tend toward the countryside and much shorted distances than Gros.

He dislikes an interrupted, uneven rhythm of a city walk. All my walks are interrupted, I stop, stare, snap pictures, examine droppings and dead animals. I also puff and pant uphill so need stops at uneven distances.

I love the interstitial, walking along the canal which is silting and slipping back to the countryside.

The final get up, get out and walk finds no argument here.

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Pinboard

I’ve been using pinboard for collecting links for five years now. I like it a lot, it feeds the Links page here and most of the enviable stuff.

One of the main things I like about it is its simplicity. Pinboard lists the links, titles, and descriptions without any images or fancy stuff. Adding links via the bookmarklet is simple. It supports the delicious API and has RSS so you can pull sets of links onto blogs and webpages easily enough.

Last week I used the service to play around with python a little. To produce a more visual representation of my recent links. I appreciate the irony. This was an excuse to play with several technologies that I do not know much about.

Last month I had read: this post Homemade RSS aggregator followup by Dr Drang. This shows how to make an RSS reader with python.

I’ve very occasionally played with python for an hour or two but do not really understand the basics. I can however try things repeatedly until they worked.

Planing and playing

My plan was to use the code from Dr Drang, simplifying it to deal with just one RSS feed. Using my pinboard links to produce a webpage. I also wanted to make thumbnails of the websites linked and play with CSS and JavaScript a bit.

The idea was to create the webpage in my dropbox. This could be updated automatically by the script running on my mac. I’ve had dropbox long enough to have a Public folder that is very handy for publishing webpages. This is now a pro and business option only.

Here is the script: pinboardrecent.py and the current output: Recent Pinboard.

Problems

The interesting thing about all of this is the several problems I hit and their solution.

The problem included:

  • Not know how to do something
  • Errors in the code I wrote
  • Errors with webkit2png 1 which I was using to produce the thumbnails.

The answers all involved google and testing and re-testing until things worked. In some all cases I am sure my answers were not the best way of doing things but they worked. I’ve noted most of these in the source. The other think I see in my code is lots of print statements that are commented out. I deleted lots more. There are surely better ways to find out what is going on/going wrong with a script but this works for me.

I am never going to be a programmer, but I get a lot of fun and occasional utility out of playing around like this.

There is a huge push to teach coding to pupils in school going on at the moment. A major reason for this is getting the right skills for employment. I hope a small side benefit will be giving learners the chance to have fun. Producing things for themselves rather than just use services and applications produced for them.

Tinkering with code that you do not understand may not be the best way to get a deep understanding of a language. It may not even help with learning the fundamental concepts. It does in my experience hook you into engaging with learning.

This term at work I’ll be involved in providing training in starting primary pupils coding. I’ll be recommending tinkering as one possible way of getting started and engaing pupils. I am sure some will be as fascinated as me.

  1. webkit2png has problems when trying to get thumbnails of non https sites on El Capitan (Mac OS X 10.11) google allowed me to find a fix and edit the source of webkit2png (which turned out to be python for extra learning). ↩

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On Wednesday I made my last EDUtalk broadcast of the year. It turned out to be a remarkable show.

Radio #EDUtalk Ania Rolinska, Bill Guariento and Nazmi Al-Masri – EAST Project – engineering students collaborating across borders Gaza to Glasgow | EDUtalk

The guests were talking about the EAST Project | engineering students collaborating across borders. This involved students from Glasgow University and the Islamnic University of Gazza.

I don’t think I did a very good job of interviewing the participants, I did not really manage to bring out the scope and depth and particularly the organisation of the project but I don’t think that mattered. What was important were their statements about the impacts on the students in all sorts of areas.

This quote from the project about page:

The contacts via synchronous and asynchronous learning environments will of course be valuable in terms of language practice for both groups of students, but team-working, project participation, communication, problem-solving, digital literacies are all transferable skills that will also be enhanced.

Sums up some of the benefits of the project, but you need to hear it from those involved to get a feel for the level of engagement from the learners in the project. Have a listen on #EDUtalk.

We are now starting to organise shows for the new year, if you are interested in being a guest on Radio #EDUtalk please get in touch.

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From my Pinboard

  • Tips for Screencasting – BrettTerpstra.com I’ve been doing a fair bit of screencasting for Glow Blogs Help over the last while. I am very much a quick & dirty screencaster, one take and light editing. These are a great set of tips for getting better screencasts. The tips are universal but Brett uses ScreenFlow which is my favourite screencasting tool too.
  • Big Schools’ Birdwatch

    Join in with our survey from 4 January-12 February 2016. Count birds with your class and tell us what you see. We’ll send you a free ID poster!

    Looks like this could be a nice classroom/plaground activity to start the year with.

  • Create cognitive plugins for Minecraft with Bluemix, Docker, and Watson ~ Stephen Downes

    So here’s the concept: you can put the intelligence of a large artificial intelligence like IBM’s Watson into characters or objects that inhabit a virtual world like Minecraft. This is not theory; this 4-part tutorial provides detailed instructions on how to do exactly that.

    Quite mindblowing!

Featured image, public domain: Minimalist Chain | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

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https://www.jukedeck.com lets you

Create unique music for your videos in seconds

could be used for podcasts and the like too. A free account allows you download 5 tracks a month under

A royalty-free licence for commercial or non-commercial use by an individual or a business with fewer than 10 employees

This could be a useful alternative to making your own tunes or using Kevin Macleod for creative projects, video and audio in the classroom.

The site generates music based on a few choices, genre, feeling and length. The site says:

Every track is unique, so there’s no danger of your music popping up somewhere else.

Here is one I got by choosing Folk -> Uplifting -> 1:30 minute long.

And used the Make it Christmassy button.

Featured image public domain: Jukebox Wurlitzer on Flickr

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A while back I bookmarked How to Revive The Levelator in El Capitan on TidBITS and followed the instructions to get this essential piece of podcasting software to work again after updating my mac to El Capitan.

This week TidBITS had the news: The Levelator 2.1.2 Works in El Capitan announcing a new version.

The Levelator is

a free app that ensures audio files use a consistent loudness, something that’s often hard to achieve with group podcasts and between episodes.

I find it very useful for Radio Edutalk episodes where we record over Skype.

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#Autumn #autumnleaves

I’ve not really checked out the new features of WordPress 4.4 in any depth but this new feature looks interesting. Just pasting a url to another WordPress blog post into the editor creates an embedded ‘card’ with some details.

I could imagine this would make a nice way of linking to pupil or class blog posts in a school blog. Hopefully we will not wait too long before Glow Blogs get to WordPress version 4.4.

I’d have like it even more if the embed above had picked up the featured image for the post. Update, I think there is something unexpected going on with this post, either from the styles here or on the embedded post. looking at the source, there does seem to be an image in there! More investigation tomorrow. Update 2: the thumbnail shows up for me now!