enviable stuff

Quite amazing.

So we need to keep inventing. We need to keep creating our own software, and our own content, even if it isn't mainstream, even if it means we are not Twitter stars or TED gurus, because it's the only antidote to the homogenization and commercialization of mass culture, as happened to the media of radio and television before the internet. We have to ensure that we have the legal and moral right to create and communicate directly with each other, to build our own networks, to share our own content, and to be able to shine a bright light on, and criticize, the popular media. Maybe it's just cat videos, maybe it's corrections of errors in AI courses, maybe it's commentary on a Chanel commercial campaign, maybe it's the creation of a way for families to keep in touch across borders. It's because this is how we grow as a society, this is how we learn as a society.

Great end to a great post by Stephen Downes. The post covers Stephen's use of Social Media for an interview. Now only is creating of software and media important it is a lot more fun than consuming. (I am a wee bit late linking this February post but worth reading the whole post a few times.)

The history of the animated GIFMAR 08 2012

I am sure most of the #ds106 folk will have seen this, but this is a great wee movie with lots of interesting uses of animated gifs. I've been a long time disparager of those animated gif clip art things on the web but recently converted to a fan by Jim Groom and ds106.

Best bit: preparing a class to go into Second Life is just like preparing them to go to a pig farm.

Stephen Downes points to a episode of EdTechWeekly: EdTechWeekly#209 - What are the big themes in Edtech? I alway used to tell my class that blogging was like going on a school trip. Folk can forget that online life is a lot like real life.

It’s also highly important that students are offering feedback to their peers, and reacting to that feedback in a way that models good constructive criticism and improving upon ones work. Opening up students work to the web means that it’s not just the teacher that’s responsible for leaving the feedback and providing that extrinsic motivation for continued growth; it’s now on the shoulders of everyone in your learning community to help one another in a much more public and open way.

A great post: Four Recursive Practices for Teaching and Learning | The Tech Savvy Educator based on the No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences - YouTube video.
Lots of food for Formative Assessment thinking.
There is a lot of other great stuff in the post, best to read it all.

As a huge Google fan, I am disappointed that you will be closing Picnik. It has been a life saver for my creativity, since I don’t know, nor want to learn, Photoshop, to do the amazing things I can do in Picnik. It was simple. User friendly. And education-friendly.

As a middle school teacher, it’s sad to see such a service disappear. I don’t believe there are any other photo editing websites that exist with the ease and the options that students can use, and get professional-looking results.

One of the 1,474 comments (by Evan, no link)  on the announcement that picnik is closing and some of the features are being added to google plus.

All the comments I read were negative.

I found picnik useful a few years ago and build it into my flickr CC search toy.
I've used if occasionally in schools and build an online 'glow' task on its back. As I've never paid a penny for it I can't really complain but it will be missed.

The iTunes U app handles a lot of this. It’s half an LMS—the good half. It handles the distribution of information and course content but it makes no attempt to verify the learner’s progress. That’s rightly a teacher’s job, not a machine’s job. Education is not a production line and our children should not be reduced to Stakhanovite drones working through machine-driven education.

Historically, it has been difficult to get access to publishing through iTunes U. The system was set up to allow a small number of universities and other large institutions to publish content to the store. One of the biggest procedural changes to the system is that individual K-12 schools will now be able to publish courses to iTunes U. In a world where teachers have iBooks Author on their Macs and iPads in their classrooms, easy access to a publishing platform like iTunes U is the missing third leg of the stool.

With iTunes U, Apple has solved the problem of communicating the learning journey. It’s no longer “read this PDF, then watch these videos.” Courses can now contain audio, video, documents, links to iOS apps and iBooks. There’s deep integration between iBooks and iTunes U through which notes and highlights from a book can be reviewed in the iTunes U app. This may be an effective way for smaller schools to provide an LMS without having to subscribe to a commercial service like Blackboard or handle the installation of an open source LMS like Moodle.

Apple's announcements further iPad revolution in education | Macworld Fraser Speirs via Twitter / @gordonmckinlay: I agree with @fraserspeirs .... Scottish Primary schools are not textbook heavy, iTunes U might be a lot more useful than iBooks as a TextBook replacement.

The news ballad, like the pamphlet, was a relatively new form of media. It set a poetic and often exaggerated description of contemporary events to a familiar tune so that it could be easily learned, sung and taught to others. News ballads were often "contrafacta" that deliberately mashed up a pious melody with secular or even profane lyrics. They were distributed in the form of printed lyric sheets, with a note to indicate which tune they should be sung to. Once learned they could spread even among the illiterate through the practice of communal singing.

love the parallels with social networking.

But in a way they're making the same mistake as those who saw ICT as a way of preparing kids for the world of work by training them to use Microsoft Office – ie designing a curriculum by looking into a rear-view mirror. What we ought to be doing is giving the kids the ability to operate in – and perhaps help to create – industries that nobody has even dreamed of yet.

What governments don't seem to understand is that software is the nearest thing to magic that we've yet invented. It's pure "thought stuff" – which means that it enables ingenious or gifted people to create wonderful things out of thin air. All you need to change the world is imagination, programming ability and access to a cheap PC. You don't need capital or material resources or adult permission.

It is this nearest thing to magic that has attracted me to using computers. Even a wee bit of coding can be very exciting. Enthusing pupils is the challenge. I've noticed quite a few new, to me anyway, approaches to this;

Hackasaurus which I've blogged about and more recently:
Hackademy and
Hack To The Future on the Teach Computing blog by Alan O'Donohoe.

Alan contributed a couple of boos: Want to teach Python to Year 7 in 5 easy steps? Part 1, here's how...
and
Part 2, teaching Python to Year 7s. Lesson 4&5, pros&cons
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