foolfillment: the blog

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I’m off out to school again tomorrow, could be quiet here for the next four weeks, I’ll try to keep up the PDF though, not that I expect anyone to read that, that’s purely for my own benefit.

The Scotsman is running a competition thing where you can vote for your favourite things about Scotland from a shortlist of 30. Here’s my take on them: (more…)

Now, there’s not reason to be alarmed, my problem is that I’m just incapable of drinking.

It seems that no matter what I’m drinking, water, beer, juice, tea, I just can’t go more than about a day without spilling something down me. I’m typing this with a big dribble of water down my front. I had to get someone else to go to the bar for me last night because it looked like I had wet myself. I’m supposed to be 21…

spilling, drinking problem

What a beautiful day in Glasgow it is today.

I have some flowers poking through the ground in my front garden already and there is a tree at the Byres Road end of White Street that has been blossoming for about two weeks already. It’s a little out of season but it does make the place seem a little nicer than usual.

Well, that was my last day of uni for a long while. On Monday I go back out to school, it’s snuck up on me quietly so I don’t feel prepared at all. We have a lot of work to be getting on with while we’re out on placement.One thing is to design a project that a 1st or 2nd year class could make in 4-8 hours and I saw a brilliant thing today that one of the 2nd years students had brought in from their last placement. A whale made of wood, with a turbine shaped piece of plastic on top as a blow hole, and with a metal mounting bracket - fantastic, it combines all three materials and a lot of processes, and the kids end up woth what I think is a pretty fantasic looking object. Completely useless but pretty cool nonetheless.

We had another lecture today about our final year project, I really want to get the ball rolling but I’m not sure how much I can really do, I need to work over summer but that will remove any chance of me getting time to work on the project. Here are my ideas so far. In a school, I collar a group of first or more likely second years and get them to write a weblog* about their work at schol (primarily) and encourage them to read and participate though comments on each others blogs. I would keep a blog as well to give them guidance about topics and also lead any discussions. I would try to guide them towards a more conversational, relective writing about any topic they like (the intention being that they would engage more in the project and enjoy writing their blogs).

Over the course of a term, say, I would try to get an idea of their performance in school against expectations (why second years might be better) or others in the year group, and also through discussion with them at the end of the project their ideas about the activity through interviews, more likely (nicer atmosphere, more conducive to obtaining views) focus groups.

The aims of the project being to investigate the benefits of new read/write web technology and the appliations it can have in learning, with a particular look at Vygotskyan ideas of scaffolding and peer assisted learning. It would be nice to link it in with ACE - successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens, effective contributers if it were at all possible without making the scope too broad. Now all I need to do is put that in writing and see what any potential supervisers say about it. My main concerns are that there won’t be suficient reading material, followed by the difficulties in measuring/recording any findings - I’m a boy, I need numbers and statistics for anything to hold my interest!!

*Using edublogs.org - a fantastic resource I came across today through Ewan McIntosh’s blog

You may have noticed I’ve started tagging each post (when I remember), I’m not sure why I bother really, I rarely come up with anything worthwhile to write, and it’s even less often I can come up with a good title, so you can imagine how hard I find it coming up with a few keywords, just take my last post as an example - hurrah for politicians??? What a waste of time!

technorati, tagging, lack of readable content for my blog

Well done England!

I’m not normally for the state telling people what they can and cannot do, but I wholeheatedly approve of the smoking bans that are being introduced across the UK. I’ve never understood why people smoke, and absolutely abhorr those who just light up without questionning whether other people might object. I can’t wait until the 26th of March when I can go to a pub and not come home stinking of stale smoke.

smoking ban, smelly, hurrah for politicians

Well, as a follow up to my post earlier, it seems the uni don’t allow student run sites to use databases on their servers, which leaves me with a problem - how do I run the GUPA site?

At the moment there is a page on Glasgow Uni’s space which redirects to a folder in the foolfillment domain and the GUPA site is run from there, using a database my hosts provide. I’d really like to make it freestanding and independent of foolfillment, mostly because in a little over a year I’ll be leaving the uni/club and won’t be able to carry on running the site. Having the site here isn’t a problem as such, it just isn’t right. I could try to convince the club to buy its own space and domain (spelunking.co.uk maybe?!) and run it from there, or I could maybe move all the files over to the uni server and still host the database here. The other alternative, which I really don’t fancy is to look for a solution that doesn’t use a database, or even any sort of CMS software and go retro with static pages that have to maintained with notepad.

Any ideas? I think I’ll suggest the club buy gupa.co.uk for the next couple of years.

I get a slap up meal tonight and a chance to wear my kilt for the first time, which is nice. It is the vet ball at the Thistle Hotel in Glasgow. I’ve got a busy day planned, a busy day doing nothing that it is. I’ve played badminton this morning already, and watched a little of the canoe polo that was being played at the Stevie building, but that’s is the extent of my exercise until the ceilidh tonight, the plan being to sit in front of two rugby matches and the football results.

I might spend a while training my voice recognition software (which this post is being written with) because its accuracy is not very good yet.

vet ball, ceilidh, lazy day