Sunday 19 May 2013 at 10:05 pm
Teach the Web Week 3: the Open Web
Plan your makes with your collaborator and then do it! If you’re in a study group, you’re encouraged to work together around your topic. Share your makes with the #teachtheweb community.
Among the suggestions for reflection were:
- Why might sharing and publishing in the open be advantageous?
- What are the benefits of inviting people to remix ideas?
- What are some possible ways “free” tools aren’t really free? Or make money?
There are lots more suggested activities and reflections, but that was enough for me
Thinking about my activity in the Mozilla Webmakers - Google+ group this week gives, I believe, a little insight into some of these questions. I was not actively considering them, just reading and playing.
Working with Walter
First Walter Patterson a fellow Scot contacted me with an idea of working together on a thimble page about a couple of 'open' projects. We have started work on this. The first benefits of open I met were, getting an idea of what to do, Walter reminded me that EDUtalk was an open project. and then working off Walter's thimble edits I got to a reasonable page: EDUtalk is Open (not as yet finished). I didn't have an idea where to start until I'd seem Walter's starting point. So the second benefit of working in the open is finding ideas, they don't all come from serendipity.
Open Talk
Once I had thought of EDUtalk, I though that it might be a good place for talking about open collaboration. EDUtalk itself is an example of working in the open, part of it consists of a podcast that is open for anyone to contribute to. THe other part is a weekly internet radio broadcast that becomes a podcast, we publish in the open under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 SCOTLAND license. I invited folk from the Mozilla Webmakers community to participate, at very short notice. Chris Lawrence and Laura Hilliger stepped up and stepped into the skype studio for Radio #EDUtalk 15-05-13 #teachtheweb. This is another example of getting great contributors by working in the open. I am constantly amazed at the interesting folk I get to talk to just by running a podcast.
Open Learning
The rest of the week I have had a bundle of fun by getting ideas from other webmaker participants. One of the things I wanted to get out of the MOOC was to improve my webmaking skills. I've found it difficult to learn the skills by doing exercises, but often find, time constraints lead me to use less that elegant solutions when working on a 'real' web site.
This wek I've found that I've learnt by doing small things, these have been inspired by the open sharing of ideas and projects by others in the MOOC.
Crowning Chad
Somewhere in the group a comment by Chad lead me to mess around with a little CSS to make A Crown for Chad the request for others to mix it up was taken up by a few folk, Pekka Ollikainen took it to JavaScript, teaching us some canvas animation and showing this using JS Bin a great companion to thimble.
Thimble Tracking
I saw a post by Heather Angel wondering about how to to create a layout that is made to be constantly updated in thimble. As I had been wondering how to keep track of thimble edits I though I'd try something. Thimble Chaining is a simple thimble page with a google form and the resulting spreadsheet embedded. The idea would be to use the form to add your name and the url of the edit you just saved. Not very elegant, but it does the trick. I believe Mozilla are working on a solution that will track edits and pages spawned from the first page. This will would be a very useful addition to the system.
Open Is...
The last bit of fun this week was sparked by Chad again, he was making an "Open is..." inspirational web app collaboration from the Writing as Making, Making as Writing study group. The latest version by Chad is here: #teachtheweb: Open is…. As Chad was collecting quotes via twitter, I was thinking of automating that. I tried a couple of approaches, using ifttt.com to collect #open_is tweets to a google spreadsheet and then loading that via javascript: open-is - JS Bin I also pulled then in directly from a twitter search: Random #open_is tweet
What I was learning, using JS Bin was dealing with json in JavaScript, I got a lot out of this play, more that I do following tutorials or interactive lessons. I believe this increase in learning is due to playing in the open, the open provides the ideas and perhaps an audience. I am not sure if my edits are very useful, compared to human curation in this case but a great learning exercise for me.
Google + is not Open!
Of course it is open for anyone to join in. The Mozilla Webmakers - Google+ group is open to anyone and valuable for that. But I am struggling to keep up with conversation. The site works well for joining in with the moment, the iOS apps are great, but there is something missing. I can't keep a record of my activities. I mentioned this in the last post too, but if I am learning here, I want to track my progress and wanderings. As a learner by progress is important to me and I am having trouble following it.
Picked up, ironically, via my Google Reader this morning was a post with much better, deeper thinking on this issue:
It seems to me that with Google+, Google is not adopting open syndication standards in two ways: not using it “internally”, and not making feeds publicly available. There may be good technical reasons for the first, but by the second Google is *not allowing* its community members to participate in a open content syndication network/system. Google’s choice, but I’m not playing.
from:
Are We Just Google’s Lab Rats? | OUseful.Info, the blog...Obviously I am playing, there is a lot to be gained from using G+, but I hope that organisers of powerful online learning communities like the teachtheweb one will have better tools to choose from sometime soon.
Saturday 11 May 2013 at 1:10 pm
The Teach the Web Week 2 is about Connected Learning in Practice
Last week we explored “Making as Learning”. We’re proponents of the idea that people learn best through making, but we also believe that making and learning are social activities. It’s a bit like the old idiom “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” If you make and learn, but don’t share and gather feedback, have you really learned? How do other people’s perceptions influence how we understand the world around us? How does being connected change the very fabric of our world?
So I am thinking about learning communities. Mostly about the practical way the connection happens in the #teachtheweb MOOC.
I joined this MOOC, the Mozilla Teach the Web. It follows the same sort of organisational structure as etmooc, using several different web sites and services:
- A Website, Teach the Web where information, announcements, tasks and the like can be posted.
- As part of that site a Blog Hub where participants blogs, or the appropriate category of said blogs, are aggregated.
- A twitter hashtag #teachtheweb
- A google plus community where participants can post links to their activities, discuss them etc.
This seems a reasonably inexpensive way to organise a learning community and for the most part works very well. I have only just started with the #teachtheweb MOOC and only fully participated in #etmooc for the first two or three weeks, but I've found, when I had the time, it is fairly easy to keep up with the communities.
As far as I can see almost all of the interaction, especially in #teachtheweb is taking place on the google plus group.
So there are 3 main spaces involved in this sort of community. These could be categorised as: Long Form, blog posts; medium on google plus and micro on twitter. Of course there is plenty of cross posting of blog posts to g+ and tweets that help connect the spaces together.
Each type of interaction has its benefits and each its drawbacks.
Own Your Own
One of the really appealing aspects of this set up is that participants own their own space and can participate by posting to their own blogs. This has been shown, for example in DS106 to be a powerful tool in community building.
Apart from the buzz and enjoyment of having a 'domain' of ones own the way blogs can be aggregated into one stream, either an official one, built on, for example, FeedWordPress or through the use of an RSS reader make it easy to connect with others while maintaining ownership of ones own space. Wordpress blogs in particular (unlike this one) are great at collecting mentions or trackbacks from other blogs.
It would be interesting to see if this could be extended into the shorter conversations taking place on twitter and google plus. I've found the google plus communities to be good places to interact with other folk and keep up with what is going on. I've found it harder to keep track of what I've done there.
Google plus scores over twitter in the ease of interaction, there is more room for replying and the conversations can be richer in both media and length.
Hard to Collect
Google plus falls down in trying to find the things I've commented on or given a plus one. There is a page on google plus that lists things I've 'plus oned' on the web (I hardly ever do this) but it does not collect those I make inside a google plus community.
I'd really like a page where I could view my activity on the community. In twitter I use favourites as a quick way to bookmark things I want to revisit. I was in #etmooc trying to use the +1 button for the same thing, it doesn't work, basically the use of the +1 is to let the person making the post know you like it.
I'd also like to be able to view a stream of my comments on other folks posts and one of my posts. Perhaps there is a way to do this that I've not found?
More sharing please
There are one or two features that could help. It would be nice to tweet a link to a google plus 'post', on an iPad. The iPad has a great google plus app, I'd like to be able to copy a link to a post. Unfortunately although this can be done in a desktop browser in a few click (a few too many) I've not managed to do this in either the iPad google+ app or in the few mobile browsers, safari, icab and chrome, I've tested.
I'd love the google+ iPad app to support the same sort of sharing that my ios RSS readers do.
This RSS reader, FeeddlerPro allows me to customise the sharing menu, there are more possibilities that the ones I use.
If this was possible in G+ it would be a lot better at connecting my learning.
thimble and other Mozilla webmaking tools
These are being put at the heart of the practical tasks for the #teachtheweb MOOC. They are easy to use online web making tools. I've a few thoughts about how they work, but that is for another post. The feature that is really great for connecting to other learners is the idea that you can take another persons thimble project and remix it by simply adding a /edit at the end of the URL.
Unfortunately at the moment there is no way to see a trail of how different projects are being remixed. This does seem to be in the works. Once that happens this will be a more powerful tool for connected learning, one could see how others have remixed the same project and how people have improved and iterated on your project.
The other thing that would be useful would be to see the trail of your own iterations of an idea. At first I was annoyed by the fact that each time I saved an edit in thimble it was saved as a separate URL my next version would have a new URL. In fact this might be a positive feature, if tracked, it would allow me to see and share my progress through a task.
Pulling it together
What I'd really like if for all of the sources of activity to be able to be gathered, aggregated redistributed and mixed up together. I imagine a page where I could see links to all of the recent blog posts, tweets and google plus stuff, even better if things you made with the web maker tools were in the mix. This could be filtered so that you could view one persons activity, or activity around a particular tag or topic, eg. Week2
I guess there is not a lot of hope for this emerging from the tools available at the moment, twitter removed RSS and g+ has never supported it. Understandably these free to use services are interested in keeping you inside their own environment rather than viewing content from them on other places. I wonder if better tools for open learning are around the corner.
Wednesday 08 May 2013 at 11:02 pm
Week two of the teachtheweb mooc starts with a challange: Explore the awesome makes from last week, choose one, and remix it.. At lunch today I though I'd take a very quick stab at this using Chad's Webmaker Profile, as Chad is a fellow ds106er and I though he would enjoy the play.
The First shot
Given I was on my lunch break, I though I'd just flip the profile:
Chad's Webmaker Profile. I went to Chad's original profile and added edit after the url, this opened thimble for me to edit his profile. I know that you can flip, turn and rotate elements of a webpage via the css transform. A quick google and I came up with:
transform: rotateY(0.5turn);-webkit-transform:rotateY(180deg);This rotates content 180 degrees around the y axis. I added it to the css section in thimble, changing this:
body { font-family:Open Sans, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif;width:1000px;margin:0 auto; }to this:
body { font-family:Open Sans, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif;width:1000px;margin:0 auto; transform: rotateY(0.5turn);-webkit-transform:rotateY(180deg);}I think you need to use both transform: rotateY(0.5turn) and -webkit-transform:rotateY(180deg) to get cross browser support, but I might be wrong.
Quite please with 3 minutes work I posted to the G+ Community.
Looking out
Between a comment and an image I made for ds106 a while back, I started thinking about the page being a view out of the computer, so it should be looking at Chad:Chad's Webmaker Profile.
On this edit, I've added Chad's photo, hotlinked from his g+ images as a background image. All this took was adding a wee bit nmore css to the body:
background-image:url('fullimageURL.jpg');
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-attachment:fixed;
background-position:center;
In the bloc above I've shortened the url, I used the full url to the image. The code first adds the iamge as a background to the page, ensures it does not repeat, fixes the position to the window and lastly centres it.
Itterating
What is probably irritating for my fellow MOOCers is that I am posting these and as I post geting more ideas, this means a lot of space is taken up on the G+ group.
As I post the last one, I irritate myself as the background picture does not fill the screen. Google again and I get this:
webkit-background-size: cover;
-moz-background-size: cover;
-o-background-size: cover;
background-size: cover;
All 4 lines do the same thing for different browsers.
I also notice a new post with an audio mashup, this reminds me of Freesound where I find: Freesound.org - "computer-noise_desktop_quadcore_2009.wav" by matucha, I know Freesound supply low quality mp3 and ogg files so add an audio tag to my page, just after the body tag:
<audio autoplay>
<source src="http://www.freesound.org/data/previews/160/160465_739478-lq.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
<source src="http://www.freesound.org/data/previews/160/160465_739478-lq.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
Your browser does not support the audio tag.
</audio>
As I don't have any controls in the tag, the player does not show, but autoplay gets it going when the page loads.
Finally I remember that Chad suggested a gif, so I download his image and make a gif of him rolling his eyes. Upload that to google and hotlink instead of the original jpg as a background. finally I have: Here's iterating at you, Chad, I had to save twice as I needed to attribute the audio which is share under a Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 license.
So here is the Final version:
Here's iterating at you, Chad.
Musing about Making
So like a lot of the things that I do for fun, this sort of bumbled along with one shot leading to the next. What was great about doing this inside the #teachtheweb community was there were lots of ideas to bounce off. This blog post was started after a comment on the final link I posted. Does that make this connected learning?
One of the lovely things about html is, if you know sometinhg is possible the method is just a quick google away. I wonder if that makes web editing a more accessable way of encouraging creativity?
Thimble thoughts
I've made between 6 and 10 experiments with Mozilla Thimble now, which makes me an expert
I've found it a wee bit slow on older computers, so I'd think about that before using it in a class.
The split screen view is really good for seeing the changes made to the code take effect. I would however like the option of a tabbed screen so that I could see the whole of the preview without needing a huge screen. I'd also like the forthcoming ability to re-edit a page rather than having to save with a new url. The trail of urls is good for reviewing the process and blogging about it.
I would also like thimble to keep a track of my creations, I am pretty sure I've lost track of a few.
The most powerful features of thimble are, for me the templates which have great comments and the way you can easily edit someone else's creation.
Saturday 04 May 2013 at 10:42 am
I've just Joined Teach the Web:
Teach the Web: a Mozilla Open Online Collaboration for Webmaker mentors
May 2 – June 30
Learn how to teach digital literacies, master webmaking tools, develop your own educational resources, and take what you learned back to your communities and classrooms.
from:
Teach the Web
The first task is:
MAKE Project this week: Introduce yourself @Webmaker style by using Popcorn Maker, Thimble or the XRay Goggles and sharing your make with #teachtheweb.
from:
Teach the Web
Which smells quite like the #etmooc first task, so I decided to remix and recycle my Hello #ETMOOC youtube video with popcorn.
Popcorn Maker has evolved a lot since the last time I looked at it, Playing with Hackasaurus and popcorn, back then I gave up and used the Popcorn.js javascript files and edited by hand. At that time, I found popcorn maker really slow and klunky on my equipment. Since then it has really taken a jump (and I am on a better box). I found it really easy to use, and would say it would now be very usable in a classroom.
One of the things I am lookingfroward to finding out about is how folk fit webmaking into classrooms, as opposed to afterschool or out of school activities, but that is for later. Now I'll jsut try and see what is going on in the #teachtheweb community.
Saturday 04 May 2013 at 08:26 am
I've just joined in the Mozilla Teach the Web MOOC.
This post is just to make sure that the feed I've submitted works.
Just for fun I am posting this through a new webservice Fargo. Fargo is an online outliner that can post to blogs, and do more interesting things. It might be of interest to other folk doing Teach the Web (I will have to go to the blog and set the category, to make this post show up on the Teach the Web blog hub.
Thursday 23 August 2007 at 8:55 pm
I've been a lot slower off the mark getting my class blogging this session, by this time last year we had several posts on the otter's blog. My class this session are a little different, bigger and it will take longer to organise them into practised bloggers. I am hoping that my class from last session will continue to blog with their new teacher and they and Skippy have made a start.
So I've started tidying up the blogs a little, the Primary Six SJ blog has become the Primary Seven S one, and I've just added an interesting blog to the children's side bar: Al Upton and the miniLegends. If you are running a class blog that children write on and would like some sort of informal connection to our guys, let me know and I'll add a link. I've not started checking links and testing to see if our blog friends are blocked yet but that will need t obe done before the children get going.
I am also beginning to think of the links we hope to make this year along with strengthening some loose bonds. I hope to join the Mothership at some point. Our peripatetic music teacher has spoken to me about learning GarageBand so I hope he can help me improve the sound of Radio Sandaig, I've also joined Voices Of The World an interesting looking podcast project organised by Sharon Tonner. I a mlooking forward to finding out what sort of tasks the project will set, the fact they are going to be about producing one or two minutes of audio makes them very doable.
sandaig sandaig podcasting podcasting blogging blogging community community voicesoftheworld voicesoftheworld
Sunday 19 August 2007 at 5:16 pm
Since the last post I've continued to messing around with twitter.
My facebook and twitter script has stopped working, due I think to changes on facebook, but I've become more interested in twitter. It is not much use in school, because it is blocked in Glasgow primaries, but it has been interesting watching the tweets spring up when I am at home. I've installed Twitterrific a sweet, free, desktop app, to view and post to twitter. I am beginning see the use for firing off quick informal questions but even more interesting are some mashups.
The most educational of these is twitterlearn :: micro language-learning from the Radio Lingua Network. Basically you can follow learnitalian on Twitter, it will give you tweets of short phrases to translate into italian and a link to provide the answer in a blog post. So in the twitter feed you see:
Translate into Italian: "I've already visited Rome" http://tinyurl.com/2osa6g
Clicking on the link will take you to
the answer.
The nice thing about twitterlearn is that it uses another service twitterfeed.com which posts RSS to twitter automatically. so the questions are produced automatically from the blog posts that combine questions and answers.
I've used twitterfeed.com to post this blog to my Twitter and created a new twitter account for scotedublogs.org.uk : ScotEdublogs on twitter, if you follow the ScotEdublogs tweets you will know when new posts arrive at SEB. (there is one for teachmeet07 too).
I've also looked at twittermap which allows you to set your location in a tweet and places you on a google map, via the google maps api. This is connect to twittervision which show tweets poping up all over the place and provides pages for users showing where they are: twittervision: johnjohnston
I am still unsure where twitter would fit into a primary pupil's learning but there are lots of interesting things being done with twitter now.
twitter twitter
mashup mashup
rss rss
teachmeet07 teachmeet07
Monday 13 August 2007 at 2:46 pm
I've been reading a pile of stuff about twitter over the last few months. Quite a few edubloggers around the globe have taken up tweeting in a big way. I originally thought that it would be more use to conference goers than class teachers and didn't pay much attention.
Yesterday I saw that a facebook friend was wondering how to update his status on facebook and on twitter at the same time.
This remined me that both twitter and facebook have APIs. A bit of googling took me to ''More status updating goodness' where Sören provides an applescript for quicksilver to update several status messages at once, including twitter and facebook. I took the script and simplified it a bit, got rid of the quicksilver stuff other services and I am afraid removed the keychain scripting for the faster hard coded username and password.
So I am thinking of what good scripting these services would do. I guess you could combine the script to tell other twitters what you are playing in itunes, what you are reading in safari, or some other information grabbed by AppleScript either locally or via a webservice. You could run thse in an idle loop so that someone could twitter the current webpage they are reading, application they are using etc. Would this be useful? Eventually a scriptable phone could twitter its geolocation...
Now I am on twitter I'd appreciate some contacts, my username is johnjohnston.
It is not all that likely I'll be doing much tweeting for now. I do look forward to seeing it it is a useful tool at the Scottish learning festival and TeachMeet07.
Speaking of which the planning for TeachMeet07 is well under way. Check the wiki or follow everything Tagged: Teachmeet07. It looks like being a great event.
twitter facebook applescript teachmeet07 scotlearnfest07 twitter facebook applescript teachmeet07 scotlearnfest07
Saturday 11 August 2007 at 10:01 am
On Thursday I went over for a holiday visit to Lourdes Secondary School to visit Lori Ramsay. At the last Glasgow Masterclass meeting Lori had presented a tantalising view of The Mothership which seemed to involve enterprise, podcasting and music. Wendy from Edict invited me to get in touch with Lori to find out more and I popped over to the southside of the city on Thursday morning.
Lori met me and took me to a music classroom full of macs, keyboards and other musical gear. She booted up one of the few macs in Glasgow City Schools and launched into a garageband lesson! This was great, I've steered clear of GarageBand except for the occasional voice and background podcast as I have the musical ear of a turnip.
Lori quickly showed me how to teach children to put together a short song or jingle, first blocking out drums, then rhythm and synth followed by some instruments, until we had a wall of sound 'blocks'. She then
knocked holes in the wall to create an intro, verse and chorus. This would be broken down into several lessons in class, but you could really see how excited the children would be. Lori gave me quite a few bit of essential information that a musical person would understand and that I can follow. I an now ready to teach some music watch out for the effect on
Radio Sandaig!
Lori explained that she was not a teacher, although she teaches sound engineering at Lourdes, she has a professional sound engineering background. She brings the real world into the classroom using the enterprise model. The pupils learn radio production and sound recording skills at SQA Int 2 Higher and Advanced Higher levels. I m sure that the string of backstage passes hanging on the wall and working with an expert from the real world wil ladd to the positive effect of working on a 'real' task.
Next Lori took me through a well equipped music studio to a soundproof room where the music could be edited and Radio Shows created. We listen to some of the children's work. It was immediately apparent that the sound quality was much better than you usually find in a school podcast. We listened to professional sounding music, intros and voiceovers the pupils organising and running the shows. Some of the music was produced by the pupils and some by independent musicians. I was surprised to find that the children produce not podcasts but streaming audio. This is wrapped up in copyright issues, the station plays music from up and coming bands. I asked how they got the music expecting that they would be pulling it from music sharing sites, Lori pointer to a huge pile of CDs these were sent in by aspiring bands to play on the show.
Lori told me the pupils organised a event at the Garage night-club in Glasgow. The show included signed and unsigned bands including some musicians from the school. A & R folk from major record companies turned up. Undoubtedly this has had a real effect on the pupils involved, Lori mentions the positive effect on their attitude and that they are learning real world skills as they gain academic success. The program has a neat fit with the Curriculum for Excellence as well as enterprise.
Next we went online to take a look at the
The Mothership.
The first function of the site is the streaming radio station where you can listen to the pupils productions, pupils from 4 Glasgow Secondary schools and one primary are involved:
Central to The Mothership project is the production and streaming of radio shows created by the students in a real professional studio environment. The studio, based at Lourdes Secondary School is available to students on allocated ?studio nights...
Plans are afoot to expand the number of schools involved.
As well as the music section of the site there is a password protected, secure section as well. This allows pupils to log on and download learning resources or take quizzes on the site. There are also chat rooms which are opened by teachers to help with homework and pre-exam revision. The site is still under development but plans are that pupils will have alien style avatars which they will be able to customise as the gain points through completing learning activities. Lori explained that the design of the site was reviewed by the pupils whose feedback has enabled the web designers to produce what the pupils wanted.
There is an interview of lori on her work on the Bluesbunny Independent Music Reviews Site : Mothership Project
Overall the Mothership project is very impressive, hitting academic, enterprise and Curriculum for Excellence targets. I am looking to taking Sandaig's broadcasting, audio and video, to a more formal enterprise model this session and hope to get on board.
ACFE enterprise music podcasting radio garageband
aCFE enterprise music garageband podcasting
Thursday 09 August 2007 at 09:28 am
Over the last couple of weeks I've been reading quite a few post as about what makes a good edublog and blog identity. Eventually I ended up on Andy Roberts'
Writing an About page where he followed the advice from
lifehack.org , I've done the same.
I've started working on an
about page. It is pretty clunky at the moment but if you are interested in where I am coming from it might give you an idea.
I've never really wanted to do this, but I notice if I visit a blog and can't find who/where the person is it makes me wonder.
I've also exported the blogs I read in my feedreader and converted it to html.
If you want to see what I
read most days you can on the
subs page. Pretty much as it came out of the reader, I just deleted those handy feeds that are only of interest to me, del.icio.us for me, comments on radio sandaig, comments on my flickr etc.
What do you think, do you want to know a bit about who is writing a blog, are a pile of links useful?
