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Badges, surely, are a way of recognising achievement.  They don’t solve any problems, nor explain anything.  What they do do is allow an alternative way of enabling people to feel motivated (and, in some cases patronised, but that is another matter), and an alternative way for onlookers to judge whether they believe the individual has the knowledge/skills required for a role.

a comment by @patparslow on a post Badges: talking at cross purposes? | dougbelshaw.com/blog

The whole conversation started by Doug Gaining Some Perspective on Badges for Lifelong Learning is fascinating (some flying over my head).

Personally I’ve found comments more motivating than badges. for example, I worked a lot longer harder and learnt more after a few comments than I do on Code Year where Badges are auto generated.

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So we need to keep inventing. We need to keep creating our own software, and our own content, even if it isn’t mainstream, even if it means we are not Twitter stars or TED gurus, because it’s the only antidote to the homogenization and commercialization of mass culture, as happened to the media of radio and television before the internet. We have to ensure that we have the legal and moral right to create and communicate directly with each other, to build our own networks, to share our own content, and to be able to shine a bright light on, and criticize, the popular media. Maybe it’s just cat videos, maybe it’s corrections of errors in AI courses, maybe it’s commentary on a Chanel commercial campaign, maybe it’s the creation of a way for families to keep in touch across borders. It’s because this is how we grow as a society, this is how we learn as a society.

via halfanhour.blogspot.co.uk

Great end to a great post by Stephen Downes. The post covers Stephen’s use of Social Media for an interview. Not only is creating of software and media important it is a lot more fun than consuming. (I am a wee bit late linking this February post but worth reading the whole post a few times.)

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A while back I posted about Picnik closing a great disappointment to many in schools. I’d used the picnic api in my flickr CC search toy and have not got round to removing the link.

Today I got a email from the folk at PicMonkey which turns out to be a picnik replacement. They had mailed me as an API user of picnik to let me know they have a similar API in the works. I gave the app a quick try and it does a very similar job to picnik. Great news. It made me update flash so I guess it needs a recent version. I look forward to seeing the API and putting it into the flickr CC search toy.


– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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Yesterday I spent the afternoon with a group of teachers and managers talking about iPads. This was lead by Fraser Speirs and some colleagues from the Cedars School there was a ton of interesting and useful information passed on but I was particularly interested in a quick demo by Andrew Jewell of the BlogPress App. I have tested a fair few iOS blogging apps both here(iPad HTML Blogging & Blogsy ) and in glow. BlogPress is not a whizzy as Blogsy but it seem a bit more straightforward to use. Basically a text editor with a simple HTML insert menu and support for Flickr and its own image hosting. I went back to Blogsy for another look and to show it to someone last week and found I had forgotten how it worked. BlogPress is simple enough that I’ll not have to remember anything.


– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Crow Rd,Glasgow,United Kingdom

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I’ve been blogging about, and with, posterous since June 2008 it is a service I love. Early on I compared it to the Flip camera:

The Flip camera and posterous are both effortless technology, in education both could help by lowering the bar so that learners can concentrate on the learning and not get caught up in the tech.

We know what happened to the Flip camera after cisco bought it. I am now worried about what happens to posterous now twitter has bought it.

Posterous explain a couple of things:

Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service.

These seem slightly contradictory.

There are 3 main ways I use posterous:

  1. John’s posterous – I always did like sending email which I uses for mobile blogging, now mostly iphone photos.
  2. enviable stuff which I use for posting internet finds, posterous sends them on to this blog.
  3. EDUtalk – Audio publishing by educators, using mobile devices, this is of course organised in partnership with David @parslad and is the one I am worrying about.

The first two uses are pretty simple and could easily be done in other way, EDUtalk is different. We use several of posterous features to get things done:

  1. We allow anyone to post audio via email, this goes into the moderation queue. Posterous deals very well with spam, we do not see much at all. Although most other blogging systems have posting via email, I believe that most of them use a secret email address, I’ve not head of any that recommend sharing the email with the world.
  2. The API this allows us to semi automatically pull in posts from AudioBoo and iPadio to the moderation queue. The majority of audio comes from AudioBoo at the moment.
  3. Posting via web, this allows use to upload the Radio ‹EDUtalk archive to the posterous stream, these are fairly large files, each an hour of audio.

Most of this could be done by other means (I think) but it is the ease with which posterous allows this to happen that I love. I can’t think of another service that would allow us to do this so easily.

EDUtalk

Has been going thorough a good spell. We had a great set of Boos for Leon Cych, @eyebeams from the Naace Conference: naace12. Ian Guest @ianinsheffield is continuing his great daily series on Web tools for use in the classroom. David and I have been enjoying the live Radio EDUtalk broadcasting (Radio Archive) and have managed a variety of show types.

The last thing I want to be thinking about is a some sort of sealing wax and string posterous substitute but I am starting to keep my eyes open and am looking for suggestions?

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Drew Naace tm win

A while ago I got a tweet out of the blue from Drew Buddie, @digitalmaverick. He had proposed TeachMeet for a Naace ICT Impact awards. As Drew is part of naace he though it better that someone else should represent TeachMeet. As I’ve been hanging round TeachMeet since the start he asked me if I’d like to do it. I was of course honoured. At some point I had to write a wee bit about TM to support Drew’s bid. TeachMeet was been shortlisted for a Naace ICT Impact Awards. This was in the Collaborative group project, In recognition of the way TM is a radical form of CPD and is transformative.

The next step, I then found out, was to produce a short 3 minute video to support the bid. I though it best to spread the work and put out a call to crowd source some media

This was both a great idea, and a daft one. Great because I got a whole lot of great quote, pointer to blog posts, flicker sets, the odd bit of audio etc. Daft because I then had to pull it all together. There is no way I could explain the whole of TeachMeet in on 3 minute video, but I did the best I could in the time I had. I would have really liked a lot more time to work on this, hopefully judged for the idea rather than the execution. Click the image below to

Intro

Naace Impact Awards 2012 Winner

I got an invite to the Naace awards, but given distance, work etc I could not make. I did watch twitter on Friday night.

Joe John tm Tweets

The 1000s of winners is the main point, the power of TM has proved, in opinion, not to have been the individuals who started driving it, the ones who have picked up the baton and seem to lead now but to be the crowd.

Wintweet

To which I replied:

Tmreply

In one way I was really disappointed not to be at the awards, but that is not the point. Drew picked up the award (nice tie) but there were 1000s of winners. anyone could have knocked up a video or turned up and picked up the award, better by far is walking into a buzzing room, seeing old pals, new folk grabbing a beer and waiting to be “learn something new, be amazed, amused and enthused”.

Future of TeachMeet

I and many others have blogged about concerns over Future of TeachMeet. I remember being part of one 5 hour twitter marathon, which mostly proved twitter is not a medium for debate;-) I’ve also been part of several attempts to straighten out TeachMeet, reorganise the wiki and even to protect the brand.

I don’t think any of this did any good, organising TeachMeets is like herding cats, fun but pointless. At the moment TeachMeets is serving several different purposes. It will continue to do so.

For me the goodness of TeachMeet is the serendipity, disruption and sense of subversion. This might not last, sometimes TeachMeets seem over organised, over sponsored sometimes they hit the spot, your milage may vary. Well worth joining in and having fun.

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It was quite a busy week on Radio #EDUtalk on Tuesday David hosted Peter Doran, Chair of the Doran Review, who talked about ‘Strategic Review of Learning Provision for Children and Young People with Complex Additional Support Needs’ (Which can be listed to at: Radio #EDUtalk 6-3-12: Peter Doran). On Wednesday we hosted our most ambitious, in terms or stretching the technology, show so far: A panel discussion on ‘The professional culture of teaching’, with Professor Gordon Kirk, Academic Secretary of UCET, Rosa Murray of the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS), David Cameron (independent education consultant), and Joan MacKay of Education Scotland. (Which can be listed to at:Radio #EDUtalk 8-3-12: Panel discussion on ‘the professional culture of teaching’). Later in the evening we broadcast a Trailer for Radio #EDUtalk show on 14-3-12: Professor Ian Menter.

The Panel discussion was a wee bit more complex than usual as I was working, David was at work and the 4 panellists were scattered across Scotland.

Panel Edutalk tn

Interestingly, to me, was the fact that I was in a location where skype is blocked. So Nicecast was set up on a computer where Skype was not blocked and I connected to this one via Apple Remote Desktop.

David pulled the participants into a Skype conference via their landlines, and dialled the remote mac, I picked up the call on Skype via the remote desktop. We used our mobiles to let me know when to start Nicecast broadcasting and for any trouble shooting. David also called me at the end of the conference so that I could stop the broadcast and Radio EDUtalk went back to its Auto DJ. I was busy working with some Trainees and could not listen in.

We are having a lot off fun working with this. Internet Radio has been around for a lot longer than most of the Web 2 tools usually used by Educators an offers a lot of potential. It is inexpensive, skype is free, as this discussion was joined by land lines it cost David 5.6p per minute, whole show cost £2.80. Internet Radio Servers are inexpensive and the posterous site is free. On a mac at least the necessary software, NiceCast is easy to set up.

An invitation to Broadcast

Most of the time Radio EDUtalk is broadcasting random bits of audio from the EDUtalk archive. This is now up to 675MB, well over 200 audio files. We broadcast live regularly on a Wednesday evening but would be delighted if anyone wanted to broadcast at another time.

If you are interested in running an educational Internet Radio show of any kind please get in touch. We would be happy to run this via Skype with you or give you the opportunity to run the whole thing your self.

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Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds.

When I was working out what to do with this one I seemed to have missed sound effects and no longer than 90 seconds.

This is an idealised walk combining sounds I’ve recorded over the last year or two when walking, some as audioboos.

Starting with traffic, there is bird song & rooks, footsteps through some wet ground, ducks, footsteps on a rocky path, a raven, a hill burn (small stream) finishing with the sound of one lark. It is mostly pretty quiet. it is also about 5 minutes long.

Five minutes of footsteps and tweets

This is as noted above a lot longer than the 90 seconds limit. While this particular example may not hold a listener for 5 minutes I do think that longer audio without speech has its place. Last year when I went to Field Recording at the Scottish Music Centre I noted:

what I’d take away was the quality of listening shown by the audience & presenters. The time taken. Timothy Cooper’s Blast beach gave plenty of time to look at the images: audio can be slower. I am thinking again about Ian Rawes’ “the ravenous eye and the patient ear”, Tim Nunn’s theatre performances in the dark.

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Last week I was in a class doing another setup a blog/eportfolio session using Glow blogs. The process is a bit long winded due to the way glow blogs are set up. Usually there is little time to do much more than set them up and get the pupils to do a quick test post. I usually just get pupils to use a bit of clipart to show tem how to add an image. O this occasion there was a fair mix of machines and operation systems in the room and not all had clip art. I decided to use A flickr CC search toy to let the pupil download photos with attribution stamped on. This worked fine, but there was a little confusion about naming saved files, the file name suggested is stamp.php.jpg as the images, with attribution, are generated on the fly.

This weekend I had a quick google to see if I could find out how this can be improved. I am now using:

header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename='. $title .'.jpg' );

To give the files a title derived from the flickr image title. I also found I could cause the image to be downloaded by using Content-Disposition: attachment but decided against that at the moment. Now when pupils right click on an image they should see something like this:

Flickrcc File Dialog

Another alternative would be to show the image on a page with instructions on right clicking to get the save dialog. Again I’ve not implemented that either.