@johnjohnston the fluttering hither and thither, a veritable moth, enjoying itself to the full of its bent. moth pic.twitter.com/OiWvLRYn2R
— moth generator (@mothgenerator) November 15, 2015
One of my favourite blog post series, Tom Woodward‘s Weekly Web Harvest had a good haul this week including a link to this delightful twitter bot, moth generator (@mothgenerator). I took a few hours to get my moth but worth the wait.
The bot generates a moth image from the text you tweet it.
As I’ve got older I’ve come to dislike the passing of time and it markers more and more. The last one in a book of bus tickets, ordering another repeat prescription, tearing the daily newspaper voucher out.
Pleasurable sights, the first spring flower, a warm summer day, a hight hawk, are all tinged with the sadness of time.
A close friend died a while back, they knew what was coming, I saw no benefit or gain.
I think on my last day if I was aware of it and pain free enough to think, I would be paralysed by fear and indecision.
In the linked reading for today’s stillness the author writes:
we share the same faith and beliefs that we will be together again.
This to, my mind, somewhat invalidates the point she believes in something permanent, she is not so much feeling the fear but hoping, praying, her safety net is in place.
I’ve a dim recall of a story, perhaps a zen one, where the master says something about waking up every day feeling it could be his last. The pupil says something like, that is the same for us all. The master answers, “but how many feel itâ€. I suspect this might be the problem there are few of us who have the training, belief or strength of character to feel this is a positive way.
In short I long for permanence.
The image, of course, is of a temporary flux in the earth’s surface.
The talk will give a view of how blogging with WordPress fits well with Scottish education’s ‘Curriculum for excellence’. Some loose linkage of Community, Connections & Openness in software and education. How Glow blogs, a set of 32 multi-sites with a total of >160,000 blogs are used and are developing. Some notes of the ‘Product Owner’ role and working at large scale to fit the needs of stake holders from a wide range of ages and needs.
Source: Speakers | WordCamp Edinburgh
I am talking about Glow Blogs next week at WordCamp Edinburgh not my usual audience of colleagues so wish me luck.
#edutalk Lynne Jones on Twitter: “We’re recording several of the sessions to go up on @Edutalkr later for listen again #EnquiryMeet https:/
My raspberry pi, was having problems. For a while it had sat on the windowsill happily posting images to tumblr day and night on skypi and broomhill sky’s, it served up a small website itself too.
At some point it stopped working. I rebooted the device a few times, turned if off and on again, then left if for another day.
I had a bit of time on my hands on Thursday so decided to story it out. Since the device didn’t seem to be working at all, I could not connect to it via ssh and it was not serving the website I though I’d better just start from a clean install. So this is what I did.
At that point, while the pi was still hooked to the tv I though I’d give the old card a final try. Of course it booted up straightaway!
I then took the pi with the old card back into the other room and connected to power and ethernet. Back to the Mac and tried to ssh on. Fail, check the website that sits on the pi, fail.
Finally I took the Ethernet cable out of the powering plug and put it back in again. Everything started working properly.
I do not know how many times I’ve repeated this sort of routine expecting the worst and skipping the obvious. I do hope I’ve learnt my lesson but somehow I doubt it.
On Tuesday this week we released the Glow Blogs e-Portfolio plugin
The biggest reason for creation of a blogs in the Glow Blogs system has be e-Portfolios. There are 10s of thousands in the system. Until now the system used was based on one of 60 different e-Portfolio themes created by Alex Duff during his time at Education Scotland.
The old system had a couple of problems, firstly the creation of blogs was time consuming due to the way the old Glow Blogs were hooked into SharePoint, secondly the themes all needed maintenance and updating. This maintenance would be expensive as the 60 themes were all different. The amount of development and testing would have needed more resource and time than we have available. The first problem was solved when the blogs were decoupled from Sharepoint in October last year. The e-Portfolio plugin solves the second.
Early on in our planning of the new WordPress blogs in glow and the migration of the old plots we decided that the best way to tackle this was to move away from theme based e-Portfolios to ones based on a plugin.
This plugin would produce profiles from posts that were added to the blog. The profile is really the only way that the e-portfolio blogs differ from a standard blog.
Initially our thoughts were to separate the e-Portfolios and other blogs onto two different instances of WordPress with different functionality. At the start of development it became apparent that this would be both technically difficult and would risk loss or damage to the data in the system. As we got nearer to the old system being shut down it was decided that the e-Portfolios would be developed in a future phase after the initial migration and upgrade to the WordPress software.
During this time we did develop the requirements for a new system, and over the past year I’ve discussed these plans with a lot of our stakeholders. The requirements were put together and rationalised beautifully by Sonali Nakhate who was first the business analyst and then project manager for Glow Blogs.
We finally had space and time to start developing the e-Portfolio solution and Stephen Harris was brought into the team to carry out the development. Stephen took our ideas and turned then into an elegant solution that fits in seamlessly with the WordPress backend. For example on the profile creation screen you can reorder the sections of the profile by drag and drop. You can also tab through the sections and use the arrow keys to move the sections up and down.1
Running along side this development and feeding off the requirements was the creation of a test plan. David Orr and Grant Hutton from the Glow test team planned to test all of the new functionality and equally importantly that the new features does not break any of the old ones. As development finished the test team fed back and the odd bug were found and squashed. It is testimony to Stephen that the testing took less time than planned allowing us to get to release ahead of schedule.
The development and test teams are coordinated and run by Geoff Turnbull Glow’s technical architect, Geoff also fed into all aspects of the blog requirements gathering and development from the start. Many other members of the Glow team fed into the process along with colleagues from the digital directorate and other parts of Government (procurement, security and more). All of the blog team are also involved in other parts of the Glow program too.
There are still two other phases of e-Portfolio work planned, the adding of class sets to user mange to and a way for teachers to easily see activity from the pupils they are working with without having to visit individual sites to check for activity. I am look forward to watching these developments from a bit further off as my secondment finishes at the end of this month.
One of the most interesting and enjoyable parts of my secondment has been the chance to work in the blog team alongside these folk who both understand their respective jobs and how they fit together. In the past when I started blogging and podcasting with my pupils I hashed and bashed my way through the technicalities, it has been delightful to see the way this can be done well at scale.
We are developing some help for the e-Portfolio plugin on the glow blog help site.
Featured image: Team Working Flickr by Mauro Public Domain.
Derek described the project succinctly:
@johnjohnston @simonwheatley @justlikeair WP central to our aim of nurturing a collegiate & collaborative digital culture in our Teacher Ed
— Derek P Robertson (@derekrobertson) November 7, 2015
On of the things I am most happy about in my involvement in Glow Blogs is the syndication plugin. The UoD EduShare site is a better example of its use than I could have hoped for.
UoD EduShare aggregates posts from student teacher’s blogs at the University of Dundee. In the short time it has been running it has pull in links to and excerpts from over 400 posts from over 90 blogs. A few clicks and a bit of reading shows how involved the students are with their learning and an enthusiasm for sharing their thoughts.
I am excited about this project because it is a great example of what blogs and syndication can do. Longer term we will have teachers entering the profession with a great understanding of this digital environment.
Previously I’ve used the syndication plugin a couple of times now for Blogging Bootcamp #2 and #ShareOurLearning. These are smaller aggregations than the one Derek is running. In fact Derek found that the plugin had problems. Once he had added around 70 blogs he could not add any more.
This bug has been fixed and the fix applied to the blog service last week. We are currently very lucky in having a great team working on Glow Blogs. Our technical architect prioritised this as a degradation of an expected service and between our developer and test team a solution was found, developed, tested and released quickly.
If you are a user of Glow Blogs and want to use the syndication plugin there is a help page on using the plugin: Syndication Plugin and I’ve put together a page on Running An Aggregated Course or Collaboration in Glow Blogs. I’d be more than happy helping folk get started with using the plugin on Glow Blogs.
Dark Forest from Yi-Wen Lin on Vimeo.
Sparks fly: an illusion of an illusion
This is a lovely video thanks to @livedtime
I remember lying on my back in the fields on clear nights as a youth. The Milky way spreading out. Or nights camping in the desert where a series of wakings gets knitted together in my memory and the universe moves, wheeling above me. This is a grand feeling, expansive and free.
The focus can turn, looking from the immensity down to me. Not so grand now. Tiny and insignificant, I flinch, move my mind away grab some mundane.