How to Not Waste Your Only Life Debating Direct Instruction and Inquiry-Based Learning

Teachers will do what works for them and they won’t do what doesn’t work for them. It is true that “what works” in a very well-defined context is an empirical question. You can study it. You can referee two different teaching approaches using assessment scores, survey results, classroom observations, meta-analyses—all the usual tools.

Posters — Jamie Clark I like the Dylan Williams influenced ones…


Learn p5.js for Creative Coding – 5 Beginner Projects – YouTube I have played with p5.js on and off, but never got too far. THis course seems short enough to be doable.


Sora Pretty crazy, video AI linked everywhere.

RedKetchup – Online Tools A nice set of online tools to do simple stuff with images that I prefer to do on the desktop. Handy for time I don’t have access to familiar tools. Got a 20 second delay on download if you don’t upgrade, via Aaron

How To Pay Attention. 20 Ways To Win The War Against Seeing | by Rob Walker | re:form | Medium I think I saw this 2014 post a few times before. Still enjoyed it. Some might be fun with class.

Replied to The GIF Is on Its Deathbed by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
Kaitlyn Tiffany reflects on the demise of GIFs. She discusses the embarrassing nature in which particular GIFs are used on repeat. In addition to this, the MP4 format is a lot smaller. Ir is interesting to look back on when I presented on GIFs as a form of quick makes.

Hi Aaron,
Thanks for this link, your pull quote is perfect. As a recovering gif masochists it really struck a chord. I never aimed for perfection just some strange self imposted notion around file size. I blame #DS106 for my may years of gif-addiction.

I don’t know if I’ll every break completely free, yesterday an image on my camera roll cried out for giffing. The modern way, an iOS shortcut resulted in a 2.2MB monster. After a fair bit of command line, with Eddie Kohler’s gifsicle, I eventually opened an older version of Mac os on parallels that could run FireWorks to to squash it to 448KB.

Although making gifs is redundant & silly, it has given me so much fun over the years and I like to feel taught me a lot.

Frank & Aaron I did a little more digging. I could not see any kind info in the Rest API representation for a post. Then I saw:

Posting capability via custom REST API endpoint has been removed due improved Micropub support

from: dshanske/indieweb-post-kinds

At the moment I’d be more than happy to post as a draft and set the kind myself. I suspect that I’d reply using the WordPress editor, like now, rather than Drummer anyway.

Replied to Drummer has a feature called the glossary … by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
I love the idea of a glossary for my site. For example, when I say Ben Collins, it would be cool if it would automatically link to his website, similar to how Google+ worked. I sometimes do this at the moment by linking to my own posts. For example, when talking about care as the first principle, I ...

Hi Aaron,

Drummer has a lot of interesting features, I am kicking the tyres a little. When I started this blog I used pivot, a flat file php blogging system. It also had  this sort of feature, although they didn’t call it a glossary. I would think someone could write a WordPress plugin to do the same sort of thing.
A previous outline & blog system from Dave Winer, Fargo, had a post to WordPress feature. I am wondering if this might be possible for Drummer too.

Replied to Command Line — The MagPi magazine by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
MagPi / RaspberryPi put together a guide to getting going with command line.

Hi Aaron,
This is a useful guide. I remember  Oliver Quinlan, a guest on Radio EDUtalk talking about the eloquence of the command line compared to pointing and grunting.
I enjoy using the command line, often with Raspberry PIs, but it is easy to miss some of the basics which this guide covers well.

Replied to Shopping Sheet – Improving the Shopping Process During the Pandemic by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (readwriterespond.com)
The current pandemic has led to many changes in habits. One of which is that I like to be prepared when I go to the supermarket, especially when doing a big shop. Fine I may not last out the two to three weeks that Zeynep Tufekci flagged early on: For food, you can just buy two or three weeks’ wor...

Hi Aaron,
Since the start of covid I get a delivery from the supermarket once a week and make a quick trip to a smaller one in the evening. Newspaper from the wee coop early morning.

What I love about his post is the quote/  featured image. I liked it on flickr earlier.

Ten Lessons I Learned While Teaching Myself to Code

I’ve been messing around with code and scripting on and off since I started using computers. Never enough to get the basic stuff in my head long term. I suspect my aged brain as well as the lack of daily practise. I can still have “fun“.

Replied to Re: The urge to publish simply everything by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
Thank you Wouter for the read. I accept your criticism of my practice. To explain my personal intent, I used to use Diigo to capture such links. However, I turned to using my own sites as I wanted to own the data. I am not worried about whether it is ‘blogging’ or a ‘weblog’, my focus is on ...

I for one appreciate your linking, mention, breadcrumbs that make up your online trails.

Dave Cormier Should be delighted to get so many mentions🤣

Replied to Re: Browser Bookmarklets for Giving Credit by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
I am all in on this Chris, but I just can’t seem to get it to work. I created the bookmarklet, highlighted the name and clicked the bookmarklet, but there was no pop-up. I must admit, I do not use many bookmarklets, only Alan Levine’s really. I may therefore have to dig into this a bit further a...

Hi Aaron,

I am glad you posted this. I like bookmarklets. I run one a bit like this via AppleScript on my mac. This has an advantage of letting me add a keyboard to send straight to the clipboard.

I am going to add the indieweb mark up to that using Chris’s script for reference. Like you I couldn’t get it working at first I had to mess around with he single and double quotes. This works for me:


javascript:(function(){let text = "";if (window.getSelection() != '') {text = window.getSelection().toString() + '\n';}var tocopy = '<p><small><cite class="h-cite via"><abbr title="via">ᔥ</abbr> <span class="p-author h-card">"' + text + '"</span> in <a class="u-url p-name" href="' + location.href + '" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" >' + document.title + '</a> (<time class="dt-published">' + document.lastModified + '</time>)</cite></small></p>';;d=document;d.body.appendChild(Object.assign(d.createElement('textarea'),{value:tocopy})).select();d.execCommand('copy');})()

I’ve not got much of a handle on JavaScript so YMMV.

Replied to re: IndieWeb at the OERxDomains Conference by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
Thank you Chris for the mention. The OERxDomains Conference definitely sounds like an exciting event. In regards to participating,  I always feel a case of impostor syndrome. To be honest, although I am in education and work with technology, my current role involves supporting schools with reportin...

Hi Aaron,

I do not think you need to worry about imposter syndrome. I went along to OER 16 where I was allowed to do some podcasting I was made very welcome. The whole conference was really exciting. Although the majority of folk there were in higher ed I didn’t feel uncomfortable being a primary teacher. A repeated thread was that open meant many different things can could be taken many different ways. I think presenting about your blog and how it work for you would make a great session. I certainly have alway thought of it as an essential open educational resource.