Creator appreciation⤴

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During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

From what I’ve read about this week’s challenge, it seems that this was originally aimed at giving appreciation for games developers. Well, I don’t really play games or like them, but I have a huge amount of appreciation for anyone who creates things that I do enjoy. Often I’d use this type of post to wax lyrical about DS106 and the Daily Create, but with my whole month of Blaugust being spent blogging my responses to the TDC I wanted to take this post in a different direction.

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I am an avid knitter. I always have at least one pair of socks on my needles – this is my current pair (they’ll be an Xmas present for my sister, the Rev Polly):

Socks
Socks flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Knitting socks like these are great for times when I just need to keep my hands busy, but they’re not challenging. So as well as socks, I always like to have a bigger project on the go. Every year I’ll make my OH an aran jumper – the same pattern every year, as he likes it a lot. Here’s the Xmas 2025 version:

Aran Jumper
Aran Jumper flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

And, over the last few years, I’ve started to really enjoy knitting Shetland Lace in very fine yarn. Here’s a hap that I made for a colleague’s first baby recently from a traditional patterns:

Hap on stretcher
Hap on stretcher flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

And a stole I made for myself, from a pattern by a Shetland designer called Elizabeth Williamson:

Roerwater Stole
Roerwater Stole flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

So my creator appreciation is for the Shetland women who knitted the haps and handed the designs down to us, and to the modern designers who keep the craft alive.

And also to my OH, who made me the hap stretcher.

Welcome Back (and Book News)⤴

from @ Memory and Metacognition Updates

Hello! Welcome back to these updates after a short (shorter than usual, actually!) summer hiatus.

I couldn’t wait to get back to things, and as I mentioned back in July, one of the first topics I’ll hit relates to the concepts of episodic and semantic memory – key concepts in the science of memory, but less fully covered in discussions of pedagogy compared to ideas like cognitive load and desirable difficulties.

Look out for that next week.

The following week, I’ll also be returning to the idea of practitioner ‘action’ research. I’ll cover some of the key pitfalls, but also provide some guidelines in a pair of new posts (following on from one that I wrote back in December – see update #131). I hope that these posts will be well timed for anyone who is undertaking classroom-based research in the coming months.

Book update

My forthcoming book, The Psychology of Education, is a textbook aimed at students of Education, particularly those new to the subject (either undergraduate or postgraduate). It is also very relevant to teaching courses and to teachers and other education professionals. I think it would be a very good resource for a CPD library, too!

Example topics that each have their own chapter include: Working memory, long-term memory, motivation, reading, writing, learning theories, brain and development, to name but a few … in short, a lot of core psychology/education content over 22 chapters in total.

The current status is that I have sent off the final edited draft, so the book is in production, and I will be dealing with copy-edit queries and proofs in the coming weeks. It therefore won’t be published for a few months yet, which is not great news for anyone just beginning a course next month – sorry! However, it will be out in plenty of time to review it ahead of the next academic year.

→ Publisher’s page here

A pile of books viewed end on, blurry
Image via Pixabay

Memory and education seminar

A wee reminder that I’m running a 1-day seminar in Glasgow on the theme of memory and education (broadly defined!). It’s free to attend. More info below:

Memory Seminar 2026 Cfp
232KB ∙ PDF file
Download
Download

Link to attend the event:

→ Click here

Recommended read

Before I sign off, here is a recent read that I enjoyed and which is very relevant to readers of these updates:

Smith, M. (2026). Smarter: Lessons from the new science of learning. David Fulton.

Marc Smith is an author who I’ve worked with in the past, and whose expertise includes both memory and social-emotional side of learning. It’s a very readable and valuable book, and I’ve already cited it myself! You can also find Marc’s Substack posts here.

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Summer Recap and What’s Next

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Where in the universe is @dogtrax now?⤴

from

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

Today’s TDC asks us

Our Daily Creator Kevin aka @dogtrax has been an award worthy participant and contributor (hundreds of ’em) to the Daily Create. We received word that he would be travelling and away from the TDC for a few weeks, let’s treat him to some wildly creating art about where he is now.

Create a story describing what adventures @dogtrax is up to or speculate which Strange New World from NASA he might be touring. Sending good TDC vibes to our friend, Kevin.

Well, I know he said he was travelling to NZ and Aus, but I’ve found him further away – look where he is!

Dogtrax on TYC 8998 760 1 b
Dogtrax on TYC 8998 760 1 b flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Sestetle⤴

from

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

Sestetle
Sestetle flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Today’s TDC is a familiar one, though not a remix. The last time the prompt was to write a sestetle, which is more appealing than today’s suggestion:

Give Mark Sample’s Sestetle generator a spin for a 6 line poetic stanza made of 5 letter words, generated Wordle style, then wrote a lofty sophisticated title for its appearance in some snobby journal.

Meh, TDC rules are made to be broken, and I really don’t feel like writing jokey titles for academic journals, given the news this weekend. So here’s the poem, as it was given to me

Those
Wiser
Dares
Curry
By the
Proof

And a version by ChatGPT, with me asking it to write a poem with these words in each line:

Those who wander wonder where the answers lie,
Wiser hearts can read the secrets of the sky.
Dares taken boldly lead where dreams may hurry,
Curry-scented evenings warm away all worry.
By the moonlit river, shadows softly move,
Proof enough that life is stranger than we prove.

And the image that NightCafe gave me from the original words:

Those Wiser Dares Curry By the Proof
Those Wiser Dares Curry By the Proof flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Then I asked ChatGPT:

Can you write me a title for an academic paper with thee words in the title? Those Wiser Dares Curry By the Proof

Here’s the response:

Those Wiser Dares: Curry by the Proof

That’s made me laugh!

Bernard Pivot Questionnaire⤴

from

Question postcards
Question postcards flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0) license
During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

This post is an answer to Roger’s Blaugust post. I also like quizzes and questionnaires, so here’s my answers to the Bernard Pivot Questionnaire (the post byRoger omits question 4, but I’ve answered all 10 here).

Q1: What is your favourite word?

There’s lots of Scots words that I like – dreich is one that I use a lot as it describes so many Glasgow days.

Q2: What is your least favourite word?

Any word that describes dead animals. Steak, yuck!

Q3: What turns you on?

Any creative challenges, like the Daily Create and anything else inspired by the DS106 community, or the annual calendar that we do as CLMOOC.  Talking about remix and bricolage, and writing about it.

Q4: What turns you off?

Selfish behaviour of any type. Arrogant arses taking others for granted. Competitive games. All sport.

Q5: What sound do you love?

The sound of a cat curled up in an Amaxon box licking a paw. It expresses safety and comfort.

Q6: What sound do you hate?

Any song by Dido. She’s awful.

Q7: What is your favourite curse word?

I like the phrase ‘hell’s bells and buckets of blood’. Dad used to say it when I as young, and I still hear it in his voice.

Q8: What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?

I’d quite like to have been a politician. Not one of the self-serving ones that are the majority at the moment, one that actually believed in “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Actually, I’d really have preferred to live in a real anarchist society, or a direct democracy, but that’s a thought to another post.

Q9: What profession would you not like to participate in?

Anything to do with sales or marketing. I did some sales jobs when I was young – I wasn’t very good at them.

Q10: If heaven exists, what would you like to hear god say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

Well, I could quip here about god being a woman. But given all of the evil in this world I’d be too busy shouting at her to hear what she was saying. I used to really enjoy teaching philosophy of religion, and I do think the problem of evil is proof that the theistic god does not exist.

Biodiversity Heritage Library⤴

from

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

Today’s TDC says:

The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a huge treasure trove for fans of the natural world (not my words, the Guardian told me so). Visit its web pages and look around. Make some art about what you find, or look through the Flickr library for something to inspire you.

I headed over to its Flickr library and chose a pic of a tsetse fly. I cropped it into a square and headed over to Lunapic to add some filters. I chose the ‘illusion’ filter and then added the smoke cloud animation. Here’s the result.

I could have spent hours browsing the whole library, but it’s Saturday and the cats are asking to go out into the garden.

Mandala Madness⤴

from

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

A lovely TDC today:

Mandala designs — a sort of mirrored gathering of lines in circular patterns — are interesting and rather relaxing to create and to view. Use the Mandala Maker (or some other site or draw one on paper) and share out your artwork.

Here’s mine

mandala
mandala flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Inner monologue⤴

from

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

Today’s TDC asks us to:

Tell us about your inner monologue. Bonus points for recording it.

224/365 Non Eclipse
224/365 Non Eclipse flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Work’s tricky at the moment, so a lot of my inner monologue is best kept to myself, but there’s one thing on my mind today. Yesterday was the day of a solar eclipse, with a pretty good partial eclipse in Glasgow. We were prepared with pinhole cameras, but the day was cloudy. Above is the picture I took at about 7pm, the time of the maximum eclipse. It’s a dramatic picture, but no sign of the eclipse itself (pinhole cameras were also no good).

I woke up this morning to a hot summer day(though it is getting more cloudy again now). So my inner monologue is all about f***ing clouds and Scottish weather.

I hope you all managed to see it where you are.

Who uses WordPress?⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

An interesting post from Matt Mullenweg:

Builders are the site shapers, webmasters, the agencies, the companies, the content managers that think in a more page-first rather than post-first way. Tagging? Blogroll? Date-based permalinks? Who needs them. Give me custom fields, rich templates, a site editor, to craft beautiful sturdy pages that will stand the test of time. A store with a catalog of items where what changes is the inventory and ratings, not the content.

The Builders right now dominate our core development discourse, which makes sense. They hold a lot of the economic share with merchants and rich websites.

Our Core Division | Matt Mullenweg

There are some interesting comments on the post too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Glow Blogs over the summer, in particular the shift to the block editor. Currently creating a new site on Glow Blogs defaults to the classic editor and a classic theme. You can optionally choose create a site with a block theme and default to the bloc editor when making a site, or switch around later.

Given the direction of WordPress is the block editor it makes sense to change to make the block editor the default. Over the past few years we have provided a fair bit of information on the block editor. Not so much on the site editor.

Our users are not typically The Bloggers or Builders Matt talks about, but teachers, other school staff and sometime pupils. They have other jobs to do1. Schools do need sturdy pages that will stand the test of time and teachers might find the blogger approach to tagging useful. Designing presents more of a difficulty.

The approach I am thinking of at the moment would be a compromise. Advice on how to do the least amount of work to get a chronological record/blog type site or an information type/school site that start to work quickly.

For example for a chronological blog site: Twenty Twenty Five theme; edit the header to have a nice image; swap the footer for a simple one without links leading nowhere; change the heading blog; edit the Sample page to make an about page. Start blogging. Obviously a school site would be more complex.

A next steps could perhaps add some ‘widgets’, categories & tags to the footer, swap colours with the styles section of the site editor and the like.

That would certainly have been enough to get me started in class blogging. Concentrate on the content.

  1. Personally I found blogging about what I did in class was one of my most useful tools, but I do enjoy blogging anyway. ↩︎