Tag: edutalk

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I am having a day’s holiday from Glow on Friday taking the Radio EDUtalk mic to the  eAssessment Scotland conference in Dundee.

We have broadcast from the conference for the last couple of years and always have had great conversations.

It might be too late to book your free place but you can keep up with the conference by listening to the live broadcasts throughout the day at the Live shows and stream page on EDUtalk.

We will also publish the audio as podcasts after the event.

If things go to plan and follow the patter no preceding years will will broadcast short interviews/conversations with speakers and presenters over the day and announce them on twitter as we go.

If you are listening from afar you can tweet a question using the #edutalk hashtag on twitter.

If your there on the day and want a chat on or off mic give me a tweet or say hello.

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We have a rather special item on Radio EDUtalk this week on Thursday at 7:45pm UK time.

WE will be joined by Bonnie Stewart and course participants in Communications in Education at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. They will be discussing ‘Considering Networked Communications for Educators’. The class are using #ed473 on twitter.

Update We are hoping for a lot of interaction through twitter #edutalk and/or #ed473 and on a TitanPad (url wil be tweeted).

This can be though of as a whole-class presentation exploring the experience of building networks as educators. The whole class will be participating in one of four roles: presenting, responding to audio questions, responding/leading chat discussion, and live tweeting.

This is obviously quite different from our usual show, and even more than usual we would welcome as much audience participation as possible, so if you are free at 7:45 on Thursday have a listen to Radio EDUtalk

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Lame Encoding

Part of the setup for Radio EDUtalk consists of AutoDJ where various rotations of mp3s are automatically played on the Live shows and stream EDUtalk page. We have now got about 4GB of audio from the broadcasts and podcast. These files are uploaded to the Radio server. As we pay for storage I cycle through a few sets from time to time.
When we set this up initially it involved converting all of the mp3 files to 64kbps and mono. I posted a description of the workflow I used to do this here: Summer pt 1: Radio EDUtalk.

Since then I’ve been gathering all the audio added by simply subscribing to the Edutalk podcast in iTunes. Today I thought I’d sort out the most recent files (104 episodes had build up) and add them into the mix. The last time out I used id3tool to add tags to the audio. Unfortunately this uses a old version of id3 tags which means some of the titles are truncated. I decided to look for a new workflow.
I found ID3 Editor which has mac, windows and linux versions, costs £10 and comes with a commandline utility.

This means I can use LAME to make 64kbps mono versions of the files and then just copy the tags across from the original files. I think, in theory, I could extract the original tags with exiftool and pass them to LAME to write them to the new file, but that seems far to hard for me to work out.

So in the terminal I move into the Edutak directory and convert all files to 64 mono in new folder with:

mkdir save && for f in *.mp3; do lame -m m -b 64 --resample 44.1 "$f" ./save/"${f%.mp3}.mp3"; done

This takes a wee while, and then this copies the id3 tags:

for f in *.mp3; do /Volumes/ID3 Editor/Extras/id3edcmd -import "$f" ./save/"${f%.mp3}.mp3"; done

I have a folder full of files to upload to the server (which looks like taking a few hours).

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Wordpress code skew

A while back when posterous shut up shop we took edutalk.cc and made it a wordpress site. I blogged some of the process EDUtalk Setup – WordPress Tech Notes.

This weekend I’ve been trying to improve the workflow for the live shows we do as part of the site.

Previously we have a page which lists all of the planned shows. This page is just edited by hand, and show information needs to be deleted after the show goes out.

I’ve felt for a while that we should be able to do something better. My idea was as each show was arranged it should be a post which would be published on the Forthcoming page until it was broadcast and recorded, the post would then go to the main page. The problem I for saw was that the posts would be dated when first published and not when the audio was added. The Radio ‘episodes’ would then not fit in with the main flow.

I did a bit of googling1, and found you can:

  • create custom posts types in WordPress which could have extra fields, for example date.
  • sort post by this date field (on the Forthcoming page)
  • publish/show ‘draft’ posts (on the Forthcoming page)

So this is what I did:

  1. Made a custom post type called show
  2. Gave the editor for shows a ‘Meta Box’ with a field for the planned show date.
  3. Added a datepicker with jQuery UI.
  4. Created a schedule page where draft shows are shown sorted in order of the datepicker field

The process of posting is now:

  1. When a broadcast is arranged we create a draft show. This then shows up in the correct order of the Schedule page.
  2. After the broadcast we will add the archived audio to the ‘show’ and publish it, it will then be automatically removed from the Schedule and be posted, with the correct date onto the blog.

What is to Love?

Out the box a wordpress blog is a useful publishing system, it is pretty easy to use. I’ve found when introducing staff to blogs they can use them quickly without much explanation. They usually find it easier to use than editing their school websites.

The next step is to activate some plugin, edit themes and add some widgets, this will enable lots more functionality. For example the FeedWordPress plugin pulls in audioboos tagged edutalk and publishes then on the Edutalk site. The WPBadger plugin allows us to issue open badges.

After that you might need to dig a little deeper and edit the code, this is a lot less scary than it sounds. It looks like wordpress is designed for folk to tweak and edit even if they have no real coding chops. Everything seems to be in its own we compartment and made to be easiy to edit. Experimenting with code in a child theme makes it easy to step back if you get into trouble. There is also a huge community of folk posting information on the web, and the WordPress Codex: the online manual for WordPress and a living repository for WordPress information and documentation..

I had only the vaguest idea of what I was doing to improve our workflow, but a very short time on google sorted it out.

This makes wordpress a very nice platform for developing online spaces, there is not a huge gulf between just using the software ‘out of the box’ and beginning to customise it to your needs.

Glow Blogs

Tomorrow is my last day working in North Lanarkshire before I take a secondment to work with glow. At the moment, thousands of glow blogs exist, running on a fairly old version of wordpress with very little opportunity to do much in the way of customisation. I hope that glow will both continue to supply WordPress blogs and to make them much more powerful. I’ve no idea if I will be in a position to influence this, but this is what I would like:

  • The MextAwebLogAPI to be activated, this allows posting to blogs from mobile applications.
  • More plugins, especially FeedWordPress that would allow a teacher to ‘collect’ their pupils blogs or anyone to create a space were others could easily contribute from their own blog.
  • Access to editing the code, either through the web interface of via ftp (I guess this might be the hardest one to pull off).
  • More themes (there are only about 6 in glow) would not do any harm.

One way to do this, would be for glow to supply web hosting, these spaces, like cheap webhosting all over the internet, could allow one click installs of WordPress (and lots of other software). I explored this in a recent post here: Glow should be at the trailing edge? but have not really got an idea if this is possible from either a cost or execution point of view? I hope to find out soon if this is a possibility or a pipe dream.

A final note, this blog does not run off wordpress but pivotx. Edutalk, ScotEdublogs and my DS106 blog, 106 drop in, are all WordPress.

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Recently we have had quite a few guests on Radio EDUtalk who have talked about or been interested in open badges1. As I’ve blogged about before I am not completely sold on badges for learning but I am interested enough to want to try them out is a small way. Unfortunately I don’t have any pupils to use a guinea pigs. I therefore though it might be worth a wee experiment on EDUtalk badges.

A little googling lead me to davelester/WPBadger, A lightweight badge issuing platform built using WordPress and I’ve installed the plugin at EDUtalk. After installing there are a few different additions to the dashboard:

  • In the settings there is a WPBadger Configuration section where you set up an email that will be sent when a badge is awarded.
  • The Badges section is where you create Badges, these look like custom posts. They contain a description and an image.
  • There is an Awards section where you award the badges by creating posts.

It took me a few attempts to get to a system that seems to work. I had to use the github.com version rather than the one in the wordpress plugin repository. I also made a few mistakes setting up badges, you need to limit the description string to long and then had single quotes in a description. Once I had changed that things began to work.

I’ve not tested the system to any great extent, Robert Drummond kindly helped, but it seems to work. I don’t think I’ll award badges willi-nilly to all our previous guests of contributors, but please get in touch if you have been a guest or contributed audio if you want me to send you a badge and help testing the system.

It looks as if setting up a badges system is pretty simple for teachers who have access to a wordpress blog they can install plugins in via FTP and pupils or learners with a mozilla backpack.

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#edutalk. #slf2013
If you going to the Scottish learning festival this year I would like to invite to contribute to EDUtalk.
EDUtalk is, among other things, an open to any contributions podcast.
Glasgow, Glasgow City, Scotland

This audio file was orginally posted to AudioBoo(m) with the mobile app. It has been downloaded and posted here since audioboom no longer supports free accounts.

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listen to ‘An Invitation to EDUtalk at the Scottish Learning Festival ’ on Audioboo

If you going to the Scottish learning festival this year I would like to invite to contribute to EDUtalk.

EDUtalk is, among other things, an open to any contributions podcast. EDUtalk started at the Scottish learning Festival in 2009 when David Noble and myself invited any of the attendees to submit audio to a podcast SLFtalk (lost when posterous stopped). We were trying to provide alternate sources of information and reflections about the festival and make it as easy as possible for people to both contribute and listen to the contributions of others.

This year given the ubiquity of personal mobile devices is even easier to contribute to EDUtalk.

Here are three simple ways:

  1. Audioboo an application for both iPhone and android, Audioboo allows you to record short segments of audio and upload then to the Audioboo site. If you tag the ‘boo’ #EDUtalk they will be brought in automatically to the EDUtalk site.
  2. Just record some audio on anything a computer on smartphone whatever you got. Then you can email it to audio@edutalk.cc and we’ll take it from there. There are usually a few computers on the floor at a SLF that are connected to the Internet many of these will have built-in mics it should be pretty easy to record something there and email it to edutalk.
  3. Another app you can use is a ipadio, this is an app like audioboo – available for android and iOS to record audio and sent to ipadio. Again if you tag it #edutalk we’ll pick up automatically and post it to edutalk.

So what do people talk about. You could talk about a session you been to. A keynote. You could talk to a colleague or friend.

You can have conversations with anyone about anything educational, at the coffee bar , in a quiet corner. it can be about whatever, educational, topic you like. Your thoughts we want them.

With the huge changes going on in Education this is a chance for us to join in the conversation, to talk across boundaries, of local authority, of hierarchy and think about what really matters today.

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On Friday I went to this conference in the University of Dundee. David and I were invited to broadcast and record audio from some of the speakers and others at the conference.

There was a pretty packed programme which is continuing online (I’ll be trying to make the ds106 one. I only attended the keynotes as I was busy recording during other sessions. The atmosphere was great, folk from all sectors talking and sharing.

It was a great privilege to get access to the folk I talked to for Radio EDUtalk. As usual I am surprised at how generous folks are with their time and ideas. Lynn Boyle, @boyledsweetie did all the hard work of organising folk to come and talk to me. We also arranged to have a couple of people plus myself for each session, this makes, I believe, for a more interesting conversation.

I enjoyed and learned a great deal from the keynotes, although my notes are mostly single words to remind myself of questions to ask the presenters when we broadcast. I’ll not blog much about these, but you can see Catherine Cronin‘s slide deck. She kicked off the topic of working in the open which was certainly a theme of my conversations throughout the day. Helen Keegan‘s keynote was mind-blowing: getting her students involved in an ARG without their knowledge.

I’ve now posted all the archive audio at EDUtalk with the tag easc13, if you find it half as interesting as I did you are in for a treat.

My other treat was to be able to have a great chat and dinner with David Noble, my edutalk partner and regular contributor Ian Field.

Not being in the classroom I was able to take a holiday to visit the conference. Many classroom teachers would have found it of great value too, if they could have attended. We know that many teachers are happy to give up a day holiday to attend cpd (we hare run well attended summer courses for the past 3 years), it is a pity that class committed teachers could not have a ‘cpd day, get out of class free’ card to be able to attend events like this. e-Assessment Scotland was a free conference and wonderfully organised.