Tag Archives: Micro

The FeedLand Roadmap⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

I’ve been testing and using FeedLand for a while now. Today Dave posted the roadmap

1. FeedLand is a feed management system for individuals and groups. So far it’s only been offered as a free service on the web.

and

4. Here’s the big news: The new FeedLand server software will be available as open source, so anyone will be able to run a FeedLand instance. It’s a Node.js application. Uses MySQL. You may want to hook up an S3 bucket for special features like RSS feeds for Likes. At first email sending will be via Amazon SES, the method I currently use. It will be possible to plug in new drivers to use other email services.

As someone who has been pretty excited about RSS for years this sounds great.

Wayback when ScotEduBlogs was a ruby app1, I had this wild idea that a visitor could create a subset of the feeds on the site, save that and view the subset in some way. I think an instance of FeedLand could do just that.

Apart from the unknown of how running FeedLand would work2 I think there are a couple of barriers:

  1. The lack of blogs about Scottish education, maybe twitter problems will help that).
  2. The lack of knowledge about RSS. Andrew McLaughlin’s post Education needs free, safe spaces for creation, collaboration and discussion. and TES Article How a return to blogs and wikis could benefit teachers | Tes gives hope there.

Most online discussion of education and even news from schools has been on twitter. I’ve always felt uneasy about that. More than ever now 3. Maybe 2023 will see a RSSurgance;-)

  1. Created by Robert Jones with the help of Pete Liddle and cheered on by myself.↩
  2. I am hoping to be able to test than soon. ↩
  3. For example: Twitter team responsible for removing child exploitation on site cut in half since Musk takeover, report claims and No more Tweetbot or Twitterrific on Twitter | Mashable ↩

More Podcasting in the Classroom thoughts⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Read On authenticity, assessment and aspiration by Rebecca Birch
The question is, whose aspiration?

On authenticity, assessment and aspiration

Sometimes I think that authentic tasks are based on the tastes and whims of the educated elite. Is a literary podcast really authentic for a 15-year-old? Are hipster food trucks really the most efficient way to learn about business? As Doug Lemov once said, it’s our role to find the shortest path to learning.

Rebecca Birch powerfully critiques podcasting and other authentic projects used in the classroom. She is writing specifically about the secondary English classroom, I can really comment on that. It did make me think about podcasting in the primary classroom though.

Podcasting has been one of my favourite classroom activities for years.

As a teacher, do I really have the real-world skills to teach interviewing, sound editing, research and the mechanics of discursive writing, on top of critically analysing a text? If I had both the time and expertise then maybe I could justify this choice. Usually, with a task like this, the crafting of the assessment itself happens through many hours of student struggle outside the classroom. It’s difficult to justify the opportunity cost.

I certainly don’t have those real-world skills. I have podcasted a bit though.

Earlier this week I tweeted from our school account:

When I observed my class being completely absorbed in writing scripts for their podcast. Getting primary pupils to edit their writing and think about making their oral communication effective is sometimes tricky for me. Audience, or perceived audience, can make a difference. For Scottish primary teachers at least the activity of podcasting covers a large number of the experiences we are supposed to supply to our pupils.

I don’t think a podcast needs to take so much of the classes time that it would be detrimental. Especially as it give the pupils a chance to practise so many of the skills we are trying to teach.

Had I spent several weeks teaching visual design, sound production or video production skills, those students would have been several weeks further away from their ambition to undertake tertiary study.

In the primary class at least we don’t need to spend those weeks. Audio podcasting is a lot simpler than video. We are not aiming for a professional grade BBC podcast. We are trying to give our class motivation to practise their talking, listening, reading and writing. Communication with their peers and an audience. For me simple podcasting provides a great opportunity for that.

#FeedReaderFriday 3⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

The idea

#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich

Feed Readers

Just after I discover RSS in the “flowering” of theScotEduBlogs community I got interested in aggregating RSS and creating specialised readers. Back in around 2006 I was blogging some ideas which lead to Robert Jones & Pete Liddle creating the first iteration of the ScotEduBlogs aggregation. Later I moved the site to WordPress using the FeedWordPress plug-in. I’d seen this in use on the marvellous DS106 site which aggregates blogs of students and open participants of the many iterations of the notorious Digital Storytelling course. The flow on DS106 has pulled in 91749 (at time of writing) posts since 2010.

ScotEduBlogs is at a bit of a low at the moment, there are not so many folk blogging about education in Scotland. I still love the idea of ‘specialist’ or community aggregations or feed readers. Of course the site has an RSS feed that can be subscribed to. Dave Winer’s FeedLand, which I noted in a previous #FeedReaderFriday, can also create ‘News Products’ with similar results.

Folk to Follow

I like to follow some human aggregators, even better if they add their own opinions. One of my favourites in Arron Davis his Read Write Collect blog is an IndieWeb style collector of replies, bookmarks and other responses. RSS.

Some of Tom Woodward’s Bionic Teaching – utan blixt consists of his harvest of links with brief comment. This might be auto posted, perhaps from pinboard? He also posts about higher ed use of technology and, of particular interest to me, his work with WordPress. RSS

This post is part of a series with a wee bit about readers and a couple of suggestions of feeds to follow.

#FeedReaderFriday 2⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

The idea

#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich

Back around 2005 I was learning to blog with my class and exploring blogging. I was on a train with Ewan Mcintosh going to a conference or training event. Ewan was using NetNewWire and showed me how he used it. I’d already got the app, probably from a Mac magazine cover disk, but not really understood it. Watching Ewan read, take notes & blog, everything clicked. I do not think there have been many days since I’ve not used RSS.

Feed Readers

Micro.blog if a interesting product. Part blogging service part network. To me micro.blog’s superpower is that the community is open to anyone with an RSS feed. I don’t host with micro.blog but send in a category of my blog which becomes a first class member of the community. Using the app I can read other micro bloggers, some hosted with micro.blog some elsewhere. I can also add any RSS feed to micro.blog so I can follow them without leaving the app. I don’t do this often but it is handy. The app is not my main feed reader but a handy additional tool. Micro.blog is also one of the nicest online communities I’ve come across. Manton has carefully designed it to avoid some the problems of other networks, no follower accounts or favourites. Micro.blog has a lot more than this brief note covers. Manton also wrote the Indie Microblogging book. You can read the whole thing online.

Folk to follow

So a couple of groups I find it interesting to follow via RSS

Caught by the River | RSS Feed

Caught by the River is an arts/nature/culture clash … an online meeting place for pursuits of a distinctly non-digital variety — walking, fishing, looking, thinking, birdsong and beer, adventure and poetry; life’s small pleasures, in all their many flavours — it was, and still is, about stepping out of daily routines to re-engage with nature. Finding new rhythms. Being.

Open Culture | RSS Feed Hard to describe, at the top of the page today: A List of 1,065 Medieval Dog Names: Nosewise, Garlik, Havegoodday & More. The best free cultural & educational media on the web

This post is part of a series with a wee bit about readers and a couple of suggestions of feeds to follow.

#FeedReaderFriday 1⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

The idea

I’ll share people’s sites I follow and enjoy. I’ll also suggest some feed readers to try out along with other related resources. I’ll use the tag/hashtag #FeedReaderFriday to encourage the website to website conversation. If you’re interested in the experiment, do come and join me and help to spread the word.

#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich

Feed Readers

Feed readers allow you to ‘follow’ websites something of the same way as you follow accounts on Twitter, mastodon and the like. Feed readers are different in that the feeds they read are, mostly, on the open web. Feed Readers use RSS to pull content from other sites for you to read. If you listen to podcasts in an app you are using a Feed Reader, the app. Podcasts like blog posts are distributed via RSS.

Chris suggests What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS) | About Feeds to get started.

My main feed reader is Inoreader. It has been the one I’ve used most since the demise of Google Reader. It allows me to quickly read or skim a lot of blogs and organise that reading in a variety of ways.

More recently I’ve been using FeedLand. FeedLand is a development by Dave Winer who has an amazing pedigree in software development, RSS in particular.

FeedLand is a really interesting product, still under development but ready for use. FeedLand allows you to collate RSS feeds either by adding them yourself or by seeing what feeds other users have added. FeedLand then let’s you to organise, categorise these feeds. FeedLand is a feed reader, so you can read the feeds you follow. FeedLand allow you to publish readers for other folk to read in a few different ways. Here is one hosted on FeedLand and one on my raspberry pi. Both are experiments at the moment. Finally FeedLand allows you to produce a simple feed. Of your own. Here is mine viewed on FeedLand.

Folk to follow

So a couple of people I find it interesting to follow via RSS

  • the dailywebthing linkport one of Joe Jennet’s suite of sharing sites, three links a day. A huge variety of interesting sites. Not so much a gold mine as a gold, silver, bronze, and rock mine. RSS FEED
  • CogDogBlog RSS FEED Alan blogs about education, open, WordPress & Flickr amongs other things. Great detail with a personal touch. I think I’ve been reading him for as long as I’ve been blogging. A wonderful blog.

I am going to try and post for the next couple of Fridays with a wee bit about readers I use and a couple of suggestions for follows.

Twitter & schools⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

I do use Twitter for school work, just not comfortably I prefer to post to the class blog & syndicate to twitter. The latest twitter crisis reinforces this.

I’ve never really liked the idea of Twitter or any other service being the official or main channel of schools (or government services). Schools should not be promoting an advertising service. My ideal would some sort of #IndieWeb set up, with micro.blog style aggregation & syndication. Federation might be a close second.

Listened: OEG Voices 040: Charlie Farley and Lorna Campbell⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Listened OEG Voices 040: Charlie Farley and Lorna Campbell on Two Award Winning Projects from University of Edinburgh – OEG Voices by an author from podcast.oeglobal.org
There is something going on with Open Education in Edinburgh. In episode 40 we get to hear first hand from Charlie Farley and Lorna Campbell about two exemplary efforts from the University of Edinburgh that were both recognized with OE Awards for Excellence in 2021. But that is just half of the awar...

Listened: OEG Voices 040: Charlie Farley and Lorna Campbell on Two Award Winning Projects from University of Edinburgh – OEG Voices a podcast produced by Open Education Global.

I huffduffed 1 this mainly to hear the voices of Alan & Lorna.

A few years ago I really hoped that the OER idea would catch on with primary & secondary teachers. Ian and I discussed this many times while working on Glow. We went to a few OER and Wikimedia events but we never got the traction to make it work.

Sharing resources for primary & secondary schools seems a very mixed bag of Facebook (I am lead to believe), the web, TES, twitter and Google Drive. The understanding of OER and creative commons amongst my colleagues is not evenly distributed yet. This is not a criticism, my knowledges of many areas I should know about is quite shaky.

I really enjoyed the listen, the work Edinburgh is doing is inspiring on all sorts of levels. I learned this included my own:

In this episode’s conversation, OER Adviser Charlie Farley shares a fabulous outreach program started in GeoSciences that has expanded to other disciplines, where students get applied open education experience working with local schools, museums, and community groups, to design and publish OERs that are shared openly through TES Resources and Open.Ed.

This has taken me to University of Edinburgh Open.Ed – Teaching Resources – Primary Science which looks as if it is full of a lot of useful resources for me and my school colleagues.

The ones I’ve downloaded so far are well badged with Open Education Resource and Creative Commons licenses. They also look like great resources.

I am fairly embarrassed not to have known about this, but quite excited I do now. I’d recommend a listen for inspiration & following the links for useful resources.

  1. Huffduffer is a wonderful service that allows you to gather audio from across the web into your own personal RSS feed. You can then subscribe to that in the app you listen to podcasts on. It also will rip youtube videos to audio and add them via huffduff-video ↩

Cuddly Educational AI!⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Reposted https://twitter.com/BenPatrickWill/status/1507824262018699269 by Ben Williamson (Twitter)

Something about this "Education AI" cuddly cuboid mascot, apparently greeting visitors to the big UK edtech show BETT this weekend, really freaks me out. It's like a fuzzy friendly black box disguising exactly what AI in education entails. pic.twitter.com/ieaZfofye2

Interesting & scary thread for those at BETT and other education events. Linked abstracts worth a peek.

Erase.bg⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Bookmarked Free Background Remover: Remove BG from HD Images for Free | Erase.bg (Erase.bg)
Make the background transparent for images of humans, animals, or objects. Download images in high resolution for free for e-commerce and personal use. No credit card needed.
Seems to do what it says on the tin. The transparent png files are larger. I added a red background and exported as jpg here. Could be useful in school, we normally use keynote & instant alpha. I switched the editor to Blocks added the image compare above and then switched back to classic to use the post kinds plugin.