Tag Archives: enviable stuff

Life in Links 12-11-17⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Some of the things I’ve pinned to the board this week.

  • Home – Minetest

    A free, open source voxel game engine and game. Fully extendable. You are in control.

    I installed that on a few PCs in school. Testing it in a lunchtime club. Looks like a free minecraft. Lots of possibilities. I have it running on one pc as a server and the class can connect from different PCs (WE have tested and got it working on mac & windows).

  • Let’s Enhance

    Neural network hallucinates missing details to make image look natural.

    hallucinates is an interesting choice of words.

  • How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You’ve Ever Met

    Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections.

    Not sure if this is incredibly creepy, just the way things are heading or both.

  • That IoT Thing: Bitty Data Logger 3.0

    Bitty Data Logger is an application which can capture and chart data from a BBC micro:bit’s internal accelerometer, magnetometer and temperature sensors. It’s available for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets and for Chromebook as well. Data is, of course, transmitted from the micro:bit to your smartphone over Bluetooth so you can be some distance away from the micro:bit and…. whatever you have connected to it.

    I had a quick test with an earlier version. Lots of possibilities for the classroom, wonder when I’ll get it fitted in.

  • Something is wrong on the internet

    one of the traditional roles of branded content is that it is a trusted source. Whether it’s Peppa Pig on children’s TV or a Disney movie, whatever one’s feelings about the industrial model of entertainment production, they are carefully produced and monitored so that kids are essentially safe watching them, and can be trusted as such. This no longer applies when brand and content are disassociated by the platform, and so known and trusted content provides a seamless gateway to unverified and potentially harmful content.

    There seems to be a myriad of weird videos, automatically or semi-automatically created, earning money. Google have now said they will restrict videos that are flagged: YouTube to restrict ‘disturbing’ children’s videos, if flagged – BBC News. It seems unlikely that will deal with the problem.

Featured image, a bit of processing slit-scanning strangness, guess the source.

Life in Links 04-11-2017⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Grist from the pinboard.

  • Creativity and digital technology So the digital is a less creative arena?

    Gardner and Davis suggested that the pre-packaged resources (no matter how vast) made available to young people through the Internet is limiting exercise of the imagination because (as Marvel has shown again and again) it is easier to repackage an existing idea than come up with a new one

  • A Selection of micro:bit Projects – Maker Space

    A lot of these projects involve connecting the micro:bit to other bits and pieces; such as buzzers, or LEDs. However, we start off with a really simple project which just uses the micro:bit on its own

  • The Case Against Automated Student Data Dashboards | EdSurge News

    We tried to inspire reflection, but it often happened separate from learning. At the end of the semester, we’d ask students about their strengths and weaknesses, and what they could do differently next semester. They would write down a few ideas, but were never asked to come back to them. It became an activity that yielded little impact.

  • Teachable Machine silly practical machine learning. Would be a good demo.
  • Educators in Indieweb twitter list Thanks to indiewebber Chris Aldrich for a interesting slice of educators on twitter.
  • Analyze | Webbkoll – dataskydd.net

    This tool helps you check what data-protecting measures a site has taken to help you exercise control over your privacy. Read more.

    One of the many links from the next one.

  • Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web – Neustadt.fr

    We’re quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.

    Lots of information and links clearly spelt out. Tempted to quote all of it, but just one more.

    Pay for services and content that you like, if you are able. If you like reading The Guardian, for example, consider subscribing. If your favourite YouTube channel is on Patreon, consider pledging a small amount per video. If you like services like Pinboard.in that charge in return for a useful service, buy it. There’s mutual respect when both the user and the service provider know what basic service they are buying/selling.

Life in Links 20-10-2017⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Some things that have caught my interest over the last week:

  • Good Teachers Talk: Better Teachers Listen | Class Teaching The post is more interesting, to me, than the title.

    One way of achieving this identify shift is to come unprepared to a lesson! For example, working on a poem in English that neither the pupils nor the teacher have read before. In doing so, pupils begin to see that their identities can fluctuate from learner to contributor, thus giving them the confidence to enact this discourse themselves in the classroom and beyond.

    Which speaks to vocalising your process. I do that (I hope) in writing, but not so much in reading.

  • School walls are oozing with unhelpful growth mindset cheese…. | teacherhead

    Get these slogans blown up and laminated and plaster your corridors and walls in them… Bingo! Go Growth Mindset

    And

    Live it. Don’t laminate it. Stick that on a poster

    .

  • Developing a Proper Growth Mindset – The Educator Blog

    False Growth Mindset

    After the recent pushback on Growth Mindset this post suggests that there can be real Growth Mindset and “Many of the best teachers are already there”

  • Online training – Raspberry Pi We recently launched a new way for people to learn about computing with the Raspberry Pi Foundation: free online training courses, available to anyone, anywhere in the world!
  • How to Live Without Google Google trackers have been found on 75% of the top million websites. This means they are not only tracking what you search for, they’re also tracking which websites you visit, and using all your data for ads that follow you around the internet.
  • Physical Computing With Scratch | Raspberry Pi Projects

    The version of Scratch included with the Raspberry Pi has a number of unique features; one of the most useful is its ability to communicate with the GPIO pins (General Purpose Input Output). These pins allow you to connect your Raspberry Pi to a range of devices, from lights and motors to buttons and sensors. The original Raspberry Pi had a 26-pin header and newer models (B+, Pi 2, Pi 3, etc) have a 40-pin header, but this workshop will work with any model.

    I’ve generally failed with any raspberry pi stuff that involves extra hardware beyond a camera this might help.

  • Simple Scratch intruder alarm « Blog My Wiki!

    uses any old Raspberry Pi with Raspbian and some parts you’d find in a CamJam EduKit or similar: an LED, a resistor, a push-button switch, a buzzer and a Passive Infra Red (PIR) movement sensor wired up

    Looks like it might be a nice we project for school.

  • Fragmentum – A microcast from Adam Procter A new microcast. Glad to see a education one appearing.
  • Clips – Google Drive lesson plan to use clips to produced short, 30 sec, movie about a country.
  • Spreadsheets – Google Drive Resources for teaching spreadsheets. Year 5 (England)
  • iOS Keynote is so darn cool! – Learners Together: Teaching with Technology Animated presentations for six word stories.

 
Featured image: Got Links? | On some large road machine from Gila County AZ | Alan Levine | Flickr CC-BY

Growth Mindset, hmm…⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

“the chance of people replicating this in schools is very small. Carol Dweck told me that they don’t have a single example of a school successfully changing pupils’ mindsets.”

from: Weekend read: Is growth mindset the new learning styles?

I’ve not really paid much attention to Growth Mindset. I missed Carol Dweck the year she was at SLF but I remember a lot of excitement.

More from the post a quote from Carol Dweck:

“I was asked once, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ It’s the idea that my work – which was designed in opposition to the self-esteem movement – would be used in the way that the self-esteem movement is used.”

Interesting read and Carol Dweck will be a guest on the Tes Podagogy podcast on 18 October I think I’ll huffduff that for a listen.

Also on:

Medium

I think this is why I blog…⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

I think this is why I blog…

Yes, on one hand, it might help someone else learn a trick or an approach. Yet I think there is more- in the retelling of the making, I get to reflect more closely on what I did, how I went about it. Explaining it is for other people, but as much as a reflective practice for myself. I almost re-do the making, and often think about what I might have done better.

from: The Good, The Bad, and The Puppy (and some pondering on Making / Making of) – CogDogBlog

Even if no one is reading. Thanks Alan.

Caution: Chromebooks – Gary S. Stager, Ph.D. – Medium⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Caution: Chromebooks – Gary S. Stager, Ph.D. – Medium (Medium)
I am often asked about the adoption of Chromebooks and have spent months agonizing how to respond. This article offers food for thought to teachers, administrators, school board members, and policy…

Fascinating article, I’ve always felt that I’d rather do interesting things on native appplication as opposed to a browser. I’ve not spent enough time with chromebooks to agree or disagree but plenty of provocations here.

Liking: Reposts and quoting | Manton Reece⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Reposts and quoting by Manton Reece
For Micro.blog, I believe the right approach is to first introduce a simple “quote” feature. This UI would be streamlined to support quoting a sentence out of a blog post, with your own thoughts tacked on. It would fit with the spirit of easy posting in Micro.blog, but it would encourage more thoughtful posts and naturally scale up from traditional linkblogging.

likes Reposts and quoting | Manton Reece

I very much agree that quoting from and adding something to a post is of great value, but some times I love something I don’t understand well enough to add value. That is why I’ve an enviable stuff category here.

Pedantic about Podcasts⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

On the other hand, people have taken to calling any audio file a ‘podcast’, which is less great. It’s a podcast only if it is syndicated; otherwise, it’s just an audio file.

Open Word—The Podcasting Story ~ Stephen Downes

It is nice to see the increased interest in podcasting in generally, in the tech realm and in education. Good too to see this important point. An MP3 is not a podcast, the delivery system of an RSS feed with enclosures is. Or the fact that a podcast, if you subscribe is pushed to a you or your podcatcher.

More pod info on the posts linked from the article above:
Doc Searls Weblog · Open Word—The Podcasting Story and Priorities for podcasting

I am fairly disappointed in my podcasting lack recently, I fully expected to get one going with my class on my return to the classroom. I underestimated a lot about the difficulty of jumping back in to teaching after 9 years. Hopefully next session.

I’ve also slowed up my Edutalk output. This is mostly due to getting guests lined up. If you would like a chat or know someone who would make a good guest please get in touch.

Why ‘A Domain of One’s Own’ Matters (For the Future of Knowledge)⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

The Web itself is pretty special – Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a global hyperlinked information system. A system that was – ideally at least – openly available and accessible to everyone, designed for the purpose of sharing information and collaborating on knowledge-building endeavors. That purpose was not, at the outset, commercial. The technologies were not, at the outset, proprietary.

Source: Why ‘A Domain of One’s Own’ Matters (For the Future of Knowledge)

Nice concise post about why the web is important as compared to silos on the web.

More

     And that’s the Web. That’s your domain. You cultivate ideas there – quite carefully, no doubt, because others might pop by for a think. But also because it’s your space for a think.

 

A Facebook Like⤴

from @ John's World Wide Wall Display

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

from: Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media | Politics | The Guardian

Carole Cadwalladr’s article in today’s Observer, is both fascinating and frightening. The technology used by Cambridge Analytics is incredibly  powerful the use it has ben put too worrying. Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s comms director in the quote above doesn’t have a Facebook account quoted in the same article:

It is creepy! It’s really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.

Featured image on this post created with a wee AppleScript Makes auto complete google search gifs.

Medium