foolfillment: the blog

I really should be making plans for my final year project at the moment, but I’m working most days and when I’m not I can’t seem to get started. What am I trying to find out? How am I going to do that? What reading do I need to start with? And importantly for now: when am I going to find time?!

Having previously considered blogs, I’m now turing towards wikis - blogs could be harder to manage, in terms of time and in creating a suitable project for them - and how they can as a means of learning. I need to find time to read USING WIKIS IN SCHOOLS by Lyndsay Grant.

More ponderings to come no doubt.

This is a screen shot of a website I built for a restaurant in Dunbar which works fine in Firefox, Opera, IE6 etc but for some reason which I cannot fathom it break in the latest version of IE.
I’ve tried getting the latest version, but no luck. Grrr

A small amount of googling hasn’t helped yet

We’ve just heard that our noisy upstairs neighbours are moving out!

The last two days have seen the eLive conference at Edinburgh - the best in ICT in learning and teaching - and I would have liked to have gone, but instead I’ve been kept informed by the near-realtime blogging of Ewan and David. The posts of the speeches give a good insight into a few hot topics at the moment and I’ll pick out a few key points here:

• RSS, more information, but with more control
• collaboration, key thing to learning, key to the real world so why don’t we encourage it in school?
• audience, a pupil will be more motivated to do something if they know that it’s going to be seen (and appreciated by people)
• audience again, pupils use psuedonoms so that their work gets critiqued, not them
• IT turned into ICT, but should it really be IC, the T should not get in the way
• Why do we teach? When will the change to them learning happen? Who is the active participant?

That covers a few things.

Now though, lots of people are in Edinburgh on a meetup in the Jolly Judge or somewhere, wish I could have made it.

I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.2 tonight in the hope that it would mean posting from flickr would work properly (at the moment the styling gets stripped out somewhere along the way) and as a result I’ve done a little bit of tweaking to the design. I think the miniblog has died a death, and now that I have my delicious links in the sidebar I’ll start using them a bit more than I did before.

Posting from Flickr still doesn’t work properly so I’ll just have to carry on making the posts myself, not too much of a hardship but worse than it need to be.

So, what else is happening here? Keeping to the style of not speaking too much about people I know I’ll say that I was at my sister’s wedding at the weekend, soon I’ll get round to putting some photos on flickr and leave it at that. I’m finished uni now, which partially explains the lack of posts - no more reason to look for distractions from revising and less time as I have been working.

It’s only two weeks untill I go down to London, on my way to New Zealand. I think I’m on top of everything I need to get sorted for that so now I can turn my attention to my upcoming final year project. I’ll put a separate post about that later.

So I’ve been putting some thought into what I need to do for my project next year. I really ought to start now but time is running out, I have however been writing up some things on a wikipace, I’ll keep it a secret for now but I’ll come back here to ask opinions sometime probably, from all those educators out there.

I’m not sure at the moment what it is I’m looking to find out, but the general aim of it is going to be based around wikis. It ouwld be nice to be able to use them while out in school next placement but to get the project all into place in time for that is unlikely, so I think what’ll happen is one of the courses at uni will nbe tweaked so that they have to use a wiki. It may yet turn out to include some blogs along the way like I had intended.

via Lyle, this made me laugh.

while (!sleep){
sheep++;
}

Maybe you’ll guess quite quickly, maybe you won’t.

No clues yet, I might give some away if nobody gets close.

Those of you with a bit of nous will be able to find out pretty easily as I’ve already given the answer away somewhere else.

One exam down, one to go.

Understanding Energy was a pretty staight forward exam as expected. Yesterday’s forays into bebo meant that not a lot of revision was done but it was okay as the questions UI expected tunred up. Now I have to turn my attention to Education on Friday.

There’s a bit of a hooaa in the nws today about the rise in the number of autistic children in mainstream schools in Scotland, the SNP are calling for an inquiry, but the thing is I’m not sure what they expected to happen when the Standards in Scotland’s Schools etc Act (2000) came in - it put into place a policy of inclusion. The Act meant that one of the things the Scottish education system was to do was integrate these children into mainstream schools, whether the SNP agree with that or not is a different matter, why are they so surprised at these figures?

In other news a power supply arrived yesterday so I am not writing this post from my destop which is now back up and running for the first time in months.

I finally ordered a new power supply for my desktop which has been sitting unused for a few months, for only a few pounds I got myself a fancy new 350W (ooh, what power!) silent supply, if it had been cheaper I’d have been aswell just getting the noisy one though because of the noise of my CPU fan.
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