Tag Archives: Blogging

A Term on my Class Blog⤴

from john @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

I’ve now been running blogs with & for my classes since 2005. I still find them a really useful tool for teaching and learning. The focus and content has changed continually over the years.

Back in the noughties I was keen on having my class blog kept up by pupils (archive.org link).

I find this harder to organise now, not sure if it is my age, the demands of the curriculum or something else. Pupils in my class now post to their e-Portfolios¹ and add pieces of work to the class blog which I collate into posts. I also pinch quotes from their e-portfolios for the class blog².

Like my own blog here I still find my class blog a great resource to remember & review. Of course it is a curated view. Much depends on what I am finding most interesting at the time. I both enjoy reading back and use it as a tool when asked for feedback or a record of some sort.

I was somewhat cheered up by Matt Mullenweg’s birthday. Sometimes it feels like WordPress is focused on content management. Matt’s post show that blogging is still loved.
While content management is a main focus of Glow Blogs my love is blogging. I still think we are only scratching the surface of the use of WordPress in school³.

Posts Last Term (Oct 2023 – Dec 2023 on my class blog )

Glow Blogs – WordPress blogs for Scottish Education ↩
example of quote collection↩
H5P for example ↩

I do not like this new normal (please be nice to others)⤴

from Anne-Marie Scott @ education

I've seen a number of news articles over the last few weeks about the start of term in various Universities. Many of them share a common theme - IT services suffering under load on the first day of teaching. They also share the same sorts … Continue reading I do not like this new normal (please be nice to others)

An Intro To Glow Blogs⤴

from john @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

I gave presentation/workshop to a few groups at the UWS this morning about Glow Blogs. Rather than use a presentation I made a blog: Glow Blogs – An Introduction This goes over some of the basics about Blogging and a few tips. Far too much to cover in an hour.

It may be useful to you if you are learning or explaining about Glow Blogs.

Some of the pages are pretty sketchy, but it was made to be expanded on in person.

Blogging Review – 2006⤴

from john @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Thanks to my On This Day page (thanks to Alan for that), II find my review of 2006:

One of the things I like about blogging is how posts disappear into the archive to be forgotten.

One of the things I hate about blogging is how posts disappear into the archive to be forgotten

Lots of broken links some of which I’ve fixed. Led me down rabbit hole of old posts.

(NB this was yesrterday’s on this day, forgot to publish)

2019 in Review: Blog Reading⤴

from john @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

I’ve often made an end of year posts reviewing my blogging. I though this year I might review my blog reading. These are a few of the sites I’ve enjoyed. The blogs I try not to miss and some I would love to be able to emulate.

Cogdog blog. Alan’s blog has been a constant in my life for years. Discussing sharing, sharing WordPress code and more wrapped in a real life with a real voice. I follow Alan wherever he roams.

Read Write Collect is my main education hosepipe filter. Aaron reads and comments on a huge range of educational and web tech blogs wrapped in a tasty IndieWeb coating.

I spend more time on the gentle, eclectic Micro.blog community/aggregator than social networks nowadays. @smokey is a one man community engine nearly every week he produces a post with a list of posts and pictures he has picked out. A few of us tried this for a while, as far as I know @smokey is the only one to have kept it up.

I love Tom Woodward’s Weekly Web Harvest which I think might be auto generated from pinboard. The rest of the blog certainly isn’t auto generated but is a must read too.

Scripting News

Tom Smith, I follow across twitter, Instagram and now his blog. Creative Chaos.

ScotEduBlogs, an aggregation of Scottish Educational bloggers. I run this as a gift to the community, but also because it means it is easy to read great stuff from across Scottish education at all levels.

I read a lot more via RSS. My twitter browsing has decreased but I have a couple of private lists one called regular & one for primary classroom folk.

I continue to find some really good resources on twitter. I do wish more of the teachers sharing would use a blog. (much easier to keep track of, organise etc). If they are in Scotland they could join in ScotEduBlogs too.

Featured image from Image from page 285 of “Studies in reading; teacher’s manual” (1919) on flickr no known copyright restrictions.

Reply to Impact⤴

from john @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Replied to Impact (Just Trying to be Better Than Yesterday)

It’s a strange little word, impact. Impact. We hear it everywhere, use it often. ‘That action of one object forcibly coming into contact with another’ our dictionaries tell us. The impa…

I say this as one who has been blogging about teaching practice since 2011 and realise that this part of my teaching career is coming to an end. No big drama, no big story, I just don’t do it any more. But what impact has it had?

Kenny, you have had a big impact on me, one of the few blogs I subscribe to via email rather than RSS.

It has allowed me develop ideas more clearly, to articulate my thoughts on education.

speaks to me. The impact on the blogger.

I wonder if you will write in other places, another book? TES? If you do I hope you post a short note to your blog to let me and many other know.

Impact⤴

from kennypieper @ Here is a sunrise…

It’s a strange little word, impact. Impact. We hear it everywhere, use it often. ‘That action of one object forcibly coming into contact with another’ our dictionaries tell us. The impact of a book; the impact of a piece of music, a painting. A movie. The impact of an accident, an illness, a death in the family. But is impact merely the act of making contact, ‘forcibly’, or is it actively concerned with what is left behind? When we use the word ‘impact’ do we consider the aftershock of what we’ve done or has it become merely the act of doing, the ‘forcibly coming in to contact’ with something?

We are, I think, often quick to judge the impact our actions are having, without really considering the long-term consequences of what we do. Twenty years of teaching have taught me that. The quick fix, the celebratory pat on the back, the smiling compliments, all make us feel good but in teaching does impact- real, true and honest impact – really matter? I say this as one who has been blogging about teaching practice since 2011 and realise that this part of my teaching career is coming to an end. No big drama, no big story, I just don’t do it any more. But what impact has it had?

I haven’t blogged in ages; perhaps, in recognition of that, this will be my final post. But for much of what I’ve written I think I can reflect on honestly on the impact my work has had, both good and bad. Much of my writing I’m really proud of, some of the points I’ve tried to make I stick by. But there are others, especially some of the ones on teaching strategies, I wish I’d held back. Those are the ones where I’ve tried something in class and written about it when it seemed to have gone well. Some of them I don’t use anymore; some I can’t really remember using at all, beyond that first flush of enthusiasm.

I’ve learned that, as I wouldn’t really boast about that lasagne recipe until I’d cooked it about ten times – I do boast about it a lot. It’s worth it – I shouldn’t really write about strategies unless I’ve used them many times and can accurately assess whether they work, whether they have ‘impact’ whatever that means. Our time is precious in teaching. The internet has allowed us to share great resources, great ideas, great conversations. But we bandy about terms like ‘creating life-long learners’; how can we ever know? Or more specific to me, ‘life-long readers’; how will I ever know?

Blogging has had a huge impact on me personally. It has allowed me develop ideas more clearly, to articulate my thoughts on education. What I can’t judge is the impact on others. Maybe none. Maybe in a way I could never imagine, good or bad. But there are so many better blogs now, blogs I read with awe and delight. They have an impact on my practice at times because I can spot my ‘areas for development’ and go searching for things to help with that. And that’s perhaps my point. It’s not only up to us to assess the impact our work has. Perhaps ‘impact’ is a word we should use sparingly.

Home Page Changes⤴

from john @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

I’ve just changed the front page of my blog.

For the last few years most of the posts I write have not made it onto the front page, ending up in the status page instead. Now everything is going to the home page.

At the end of 2014 I started experimenting with some IndieWeb technology on my blog. In 2017 I started using the beta version of micro.blog, this meant I was posting on a wider variety of topics with lots of short status type posts.

I decided to keep these off the home page, reserving that for posts categorised as wwwd posts that were longer and about ‘Teaching, ict, and suchlike’. I added a status link to my menus along with a photos page. Now I’ve move back to everything on the home page.

As time went on my blogging has branched out to include recording the books I’ve read and films I’ve watched and other things. Some, not all yet, of my tweets and some of my replies to other blogs are now posted on this blog and auto post to twitter and the blog I am commenting on. I manually post the same photos to instagram as I do here and Bridgy brings back my comments to the blog.

I am not exactly breaking new indieweb ground her or even pushing very hard, but I am enjoying expanding my blogging, pulling in content posted elsewhere is the past and bringing my digital life a little closer together. I’ve changed the Status menu to Articles in case anyone is only interested in longer, likely educational, posts. As I blog more I see my blog as primarily for me with some added benefits from sharing.

Featured images, my own, the Garpel Water in Ayrshire an meandering stream.

ALTC Personal Highlights⤴

from Open World

I’ve already written an overview and some thoughts on the ALTC keynotes, this post is an additional reflection on some of my personal highlights of the conference.

I was involved in three sessions this year; Wikipedia belongs in education with Wikimedia UK CEO Lucy Crompton-Reid and UoE Wikimedian in Residence Ewan McAndrew, Influential voices – developing a blogging service based on trust and openness with DLAM’s Karen Howie, and Supporting Creative Engagement and Open Education at the University of Edinburgh with LTW colleagues Charlie Farley and Stewart Cromar. All three sessions went really well, with lots of questions and engagement from the audience.

It’s always great to see that lightbulb moment when people start to understand the potential of using Wikipedia in the classroom to develop critical digital and information literacy skills. There was a lot of interest in (and a little envy of) UoE’s Academic Blogging Service and centrally supported WordPress platform, blogs.ed.ac.uk, so it was great to be able to share some of the open resources we’ve created along the way including policies, digital skills resources, podcasts, blog posts, open source code and the blogs themselves. And of course there was a lot of love for our creative engagement approaches and open resources including Board Game Jam and the lovely We have great stuff colouring book.

Stewart Cromar also did a gasta talk and poster on the colouring book and at one point I passed a delegate standing alone in the hallway quietly colouring in the poster. As I passed, I mentioned that she could take one of the colouring books and home with her. She nodded and smiled and carried on colouring. A lovely quite moment in a busy conference.

It was great to hear Charlie talking about the enduringly popular and infinitely adaptable 23 Things course, and what made it doubly special was that she was co-presenting with my old Cetis colleague R. John Robertson, who is now using the course with his students at Seattle Pacific University. I’ve been very lucky to work with both Charlie and John, and it’s lovely to see them collaborating like this.

Our Witchfinder General intern Emma Carroll presented a brilliant gasta talk on using Wikidata to geographically locate and visualise the different locations recorded within the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database. It’s an incredible piece of work and several delegates commented on how confidently Emma presented her project. You can see the outputs of Emma’s internship here https://witches.is.ed.ac.uk/about

Emma Carroll, CC BY NC 2.0, Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology

I really loved Kate Lindsay’s thoughtful presentation on KARE, a kind, accessible, respectful, ethical scaffolding system to support online education at University College of Estate Management. And I loved her Rosa Parks shirt.

Kate Lindsay, CC BY NC, Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology

I also really enjoyed Claudia Cox’s engaging and entertaining talk Here be Dragons: Dispelling Myths around BYOD Digital Examinations. Claudia surely wins the prize for best closing comment…

Claudia Cox “I came here to slay, I hope I did that today” *APPLAUSE* #altc pic.twitter.com/6OWDTsECgm

— Lorna M. Campbell (@LornaMCampbell) September 3, 2019

Sheila MacNeill and Keith Smyth gave a great talk on their conceptual framework for reimagining the digital university which aims to challenge neoliberalism through discursive, reflective digital pedagogy. We need this now more than ever.

Keith Smyth, CC BY, Lorna M. Campbell

Sadly I missed Helen Beetham’s session Learning technology: a feminist space? but I heard it was really inspiring. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been able to hear Helen talk, we always seem to be programmed in the same slot! I also had to miss Laura Czerniewicz’s Online learning during university shut downs, so I’m very glad it was recorded. I’m looking forward to catching up with is as soon as I can.

The Learning Technologist of the Year Awards were truly inspiring as always. Lizzie Seymour, Learning Technology Officer, Royal Zoological Society of Scotland at Edinburgh Zoo was a very well deserved winner of the individual award, and I was really proud to see the University of Edinburgh’s Lecture Recording Team win the team award. So many people across the University were involved in this project so it was great to see their hard work recognised.

UoE Lecture Recording Team, CC BY NC, Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology

Without doubt though the highlight of the conference for me was Frances Bell‘s award of Honorary Life Membership of the Association for Learning Technology. Frances is a dear friend and an inspirational colleague who really embodies ALT’s core values of participation, openness, collaboration and independence, so it was a huge honour to be invited to present her with the award. Frances’ nomination was led by Catherine Cronin, who wasn’t able to be at the conference, so it gave me great pleasure to read out her words.

“What a joy to see Frances Bell – who exemplifies active, engaged and generous scholarship combined with an ethic of care –being recognised with this Honorary Life Membership Award by ALT.

As evidenced in her lifetime of work, Frances has combined her disciplinary expertise in Information Systems with historical and social justice perspectives to unflinchingly consider issues of equity in both higher education and wider society.

Uniquely, Frances sustains connections with people across higher education, local communities and creative networks in ways which help to bridge differences without ignoring them, and thus to enable understanding.

Within and beyond ALT, we all have much to thank her for.”

I confess I couldn’t look at Frances while I was reading Catherine’s words as it was such an emotional moment. I’m immensely proud of ALT for recognising Frances’ contribution to the community and for honouring her in this way.

Frances Bell, Honorary Life Member or ALT, CC BY NC, Chris Bull for Association for Learning Technology

And finally, huge thanks to Maren, Martin and the rest of the ALT team for organising another successful, warm and welcoming conference.