foolfillment: the blog

I’ve just spent a wee while after dinner playing with some new headers for the site, they’re randomly selected from a list of 5, so just hit refresh and you should eventually cycle through them all, I think full sizes of all of the images are available on my flickr photostream. Those of you who only read my blog through an aggregator won’t care at all about this. On the subject I’ve been using Google Reader for the last week or so, I have to say it’s much friendlier than bloglines with a lot of nice features, such as marking posts as read just by scrolling past them.

[tags]random headers, flickr, google reader, bloglines, aggregators[/tags]

Ewan writes today about access restrictions to certain websites in schools, about how the filtering systems is different in each school. He makes the point that there should be some sort of guidance to enable progress:

So what are the main issues halting progress?

1. Fear of…
* Inappropriate material
Yet, teachers will use Google Images (unmoderated by a community) instead of (the blocked) Flickr.

Source: Ewan McIntosh, Dear Head of Education: Please don’t check my briefcase when I come to school

I came across this on my last placement. I was helping out a class in my last week that needed emergency cover. They were given a task of looking for examples of projects that they could make when they come to do their Craft Project in fourth year - looking for things like small tables, jewellery boxes, mirror stands, that sort of thing. I was told to use google images.

I didn’t have time to query if flickr was accessible, I would have first had to explain to the PT what flickr was, then explain to the pupils how to use it (it could have been the perfect lesson to introduce ideas about copyrighted material and how to find usable materials but that wasn’t what I had to get them to do).

Anyway, I got them sitting down infront of a pc and searching for images. A couple of them wanted to make snooker cue cases, ‘fine’ I said later to have a minor uprising when they discover one of the top results is of an injured 11 year old boy. I’ll not explain the injury, rather leave you to see it if you want. Google Search.

This should explain for those who don’t already know.

Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King

Nowadays when I read blogs I spend most of my time reading them through bloglines without actually looking at people’s designs, this is a real shame as I used to enjoy seeing pages evolve over time and I know I’ve put a lot of though over the years putting together designs for foolfillment so that it looked good for everyone. To think that nobody actually looks at anything other than the content is disheartening especially for someone who likes to think of himself as a designer.

Using nothing but an aggregator means that all the pages look the same, the only difference being the content. My site just blends into one step on your walk through the blogosphere and I lose identity. One way to change this would be to only offer up an excerpt in the feeds (Ewan did this until recently) but is this a bit rude - forcing people to see the world through my eyes? Is it better to put the effort into making content stand out as my identity?

While trying to avoid a navel-gazing ‘why do I blog’ post of circa 2002, it does make me ask if keeping a regular blog is worth it unless people read it?

A quick post. I’ve spent today editing lesson plans and things like that, but also putting together a sort of overview of what wikis are and how they could be useful in education - this is for the students who will be helping me with my research in my final year project. While doing this I remembered the lecture that Ewan McIntosh did at Jordanhill in January on web2.0. I went back and watched it again, this time the one of the actual presentation not the one done afterwards. It’s made me think again about how I can use these things in the classroom. But will I have the chance, will I be able to do these things when I have my own classes? I really hope so but it won’t be until at least probation year - it won’t happen this placement because there just isn’t trhe flexibility in the course (mine - not the pupils’).

I’ve also been playing with carbonmade after Ollie and Ewan (again) talking about it last week. It’s interesting, doesn’t have any two way features that I’ve seen but it could be fantastically useful in schools. Royal High School already has a geat website showcasing the best work to come out of its tech dept but carbonmade could make it easy for all the pupils to do the same - can you imaginge the feeling that kids would get if people looked at their work and talked about it. I’d love to get something set up with the people in my year so that we could set up a reciprocal link - encourage my classes to look at the work of their’s. A similar thing with real people, I know peopl doing industrial design at uni - what if that sort of person commented on a fourth year’s Craft and Design Folio?
Anyway a very quick post with a distinct lack of insight - I’ll come back to this tomorrow.

Lordy is letting me work on his PHP project*, which is very nice of him as I break it a lot. I add bits of code here and there and try to make it look a little prettier, while he builds it all and makes it actually work and has ideas about what it should do and how it should do it. I’ve been working on the actual code that makes the site run (it is running, those of you who know the site know this already, those of you who have no idea what it is don’t need to for this story, but I have written about it in an earlier post) and making changes happen ‘live’ as it were, this is fine as long as I don’t break it. Anyway, Lordy has been working on the code that he has running on his machine, this is fine because if he breaks something then the real site still works.

And that is where the problem lies, you see now that lordy has completed a little bit he was working on he’s uploaded the new files. And now all the bits I’ve been doing recently have been overwritten. Bum. We need to find a better way of each separately working on the same files.
*Of which you may hear more in time

My final year project has been going round in my head a lot recently and I had a meeting with my supreviser today and I’m quite excited with what may happen. Rather than re-writing everything I’ve just writtewn though here’s a link to my wikispaces page where I’m developing my thoughts. foolfillment.wikispaces.com Please feel free to add a comment to the discussion page, I’d really appreciate any comments or ideas you may have, or resources you have maybe seen that may be valuable to me.

There’s a flurry of posts over at Ewan McIntosh’s blog today, standing out in particular to me is discussion about filters in schools, when I was in school the filter was a constant pain - the internet was off limits for chemistry research because too many sites used the words bonds and bonding, a sixth year colleague who was trying to work for her AH Modern Studies dissertation couldn’t do any reseach at school becuase her topic was to do with prostitution. No doubt filters have become more sophisticated but I can’t help but feel that we have the duty to prepare students for what they could come across when they use the net at home, would it not be of more benefit to try to build good practice where we can monitor what is being viewed than to restrict everything potentially dangerous until the kids are alone?
These thoughts echo the sentiment behind Struan’s post on to bebo or not to bebo a few weeks back. We have the duty to educate kids on how to get the best out of the web and to avoid the nasty bits, but instead we wrap them up in cotton wool and pretend everything’s hunkydory untill they leave the building, the other side of it is that at the same time we are restricting their access to potentially valuable tools - I know some of my fellow BTechEd students have found difficulties getting access to moodle while we’ve been out on placement, and how many blogs, wikis, email clients, IRC clients can you use in schools?

As an aside, diamond geezer’s post on Wednesday spurred me to update my blogroll, so I’ve added - at last - a few of the edublogs that I’ve been reading, and checked the other links, there’s still a few other there that seem dormant but I don’t want to write them off just yet. Dive in they’re over there —>

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

Having known about it for a long time I finally got around to signing up to bebo. I’m not sure why, it seems like it’s just another distraction, flickr seems better fun to me. Oh well, I suppose it’s a bit of ‘professional development’…