The Future of Further Education?

Well, this blog is supposed to about education (as was Sid Waddell, once upon a time) so...

I'd like to think that there's an element of irony here but can't really see it. And didn't The Mirror used to be a newspaper famous for it's campaigning & investigative journalism? Or are we all Sun readers now?

Anyway, this final post of 2009 was inspired by a story from The Guardian - Darts academy aims to shed beer and tattoos image by Peter Walker.

All the best for 2010. With Cameron and his rapid puppies on the horizon, we'll need all the luck(?) we can muster. Send in Charlie Brooker I say!

What Matters Now : Seth Godin

God knows that we need some fresh thinking in FE.
No. Perhaps not.
Maybe what we do need is listening to some fresh thinking. Not "we've never done it that way before" listening and "it'll screw the integrity of our security" listening and "it's not your responsibility but mine" listening.

Read this. Download it. Tweet it. But listen... Please.

What Matters Now, by Seth Godin

View more documents from Toscana Enterprises Corporation.

Seth Godin's blog & e-book download:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/what-matters-now-get-the-free-ebook.html

OpenLearn Climate Change (Blog Action Day)

Back. For a good cause. And since we're (still) in the education game (no matter what the accountants might say), here's my no-pence worth. After all we're talking open courseware from the venerable (younger than me) Open University.


Global Warming (E500_111)
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1526
An introduction to global warming. 5 hours.

Climate Change (S250_3)
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2805
Climate change is a key issue on today’s social and political agenda. This unit explores the basic science that underpins climate change and global warming. 18 hours.

And on a less serious note(?), a video from Friends of the Earth:



See you soon...?

The Dark Is Rising...

So Long and thanks

Well, it had to happen sometime. Inverness Caley Thistle relegated ten minutes ago. (If you're an Old Firm supporter you can stop reading now. You really don't know how it feels. Missing out on a league title? What a shame!)
Anyway, thanks for the memories. The North will rise again. Sometime...
And this is how we got there.

And I won't even mention civilisation, city status, fastest growing city in Europe, etc. But I have. There you go. Good luck to St. Johnstone, bring on the County.

And Roscoe. Don't worry, you're still the main man.

May Day 2009

...or given our present plight, m'aidez!

Anyway, here's one of my favourite scenes from the Ken Loach film, Land And Freedom.



And just to add a wee bit of the old learning technologies, the following are links to the same video clip.
The first is on YouTube with all the associated clutter, inane comments, attempted spamming and other such distractions. (To be fair there's just a bit of the good old political factionalism here, but if you use YouTube a lot, you'll know what I mean).
The second link filters the same video through QuietTube, which as it says provides "video without the distractions". There's a bookmarklet available too as well as a shortened, persistent bitly URL. Thoroughly recommended.

Internationale @ YouTube

Internationale @ QuietTube

Venceremos!

For Boris Johnson and St. George

Not really for Boris. Or the right wingers that would hijack folk. For the Tolpuddle Martyrs and all the others. And Jack Jones (RIP). Read The Guardian story here. Yeah, I know, bloody left-wingers...
























2 Wordles in one day? Well if it's good enough for the aforementioned newspaper...

Graphic courtesy Wordle - www.wordle.com
Lyric - Leon Rosselson : The World Turned Upside Down

It's A Mad, Mad World, My Masters!

Sage words... List well.

How long you sayMichael? About 3 minutes but a great stress-buster!



Image courtesy Wordle - http://www.wordle.com

Earth Day 2009

Would that he were wrong...



Sorry. Bad day at Black Rock.

e-Books for FE from the JISC

The e-books for FE Project will provide Further Education colleges in the UK with access to a Core Collection of e-books on a platform which provides functionality suitable for the needs of the community.

Well, we've had the consultation and now we wait until May. Or perhaps not. There's nothing on the project website (http://fe.jiscebooksproject.org/) as of today - maybe we're all still on holiday - but according to a press release published on Wednesday 15th on Yahoo! Finance...

"...ebrary®, a leading provider of e-content services and technology, today announced that it has been appointed by JISC Collections to supply the e-book content and delivery platform for its multimillion-dollar e-books for FE Project. Under the terms of the contract, negotiated in partnership with the company’s authorized distributor 2info, the JISC will fund a collection of over 3,000 multidisciplinary e-books from ebrary and use ebrary’s technology to deliver the content to over 440 Further Education colleges in the United Kingdom. Participating colleges may also supplement this collection by purchasing additional titles through a framework agreement."

Maybe I didn't read the original project documentation properly. Maybe I just imagined that what we would get would be something along the lines of the HE Project (36 e-books). Maybe somebody's just jumped the gun a wee bit (although the press release is from ebrary). We'll see.

What I do know (and this is not a complaint), 3000 e-books is an awful lot of cataloguing if you don't have that MARC import module on your LMS... Goodbye summer projects.

Put people first

Remember when the Masters of the Universe made poverty history? (That's not as in making poverty a thing of the past, but as in achieving a high (low) never reached before). Well, here we go again...

Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com

Beyond Here Lies Nothin'

Free mp3 of the first track of the new Dylan album, Together Through Life, available at http://www.bobdylan.com/ available until 5.00 a.m. tomorrow (Tuesday). Time zone? Who knows.

The music? Think 50s Chess. Think Ry Cooder.

Yeah, the full CD is probably available on Rapidshare or some other site somewhere, but this is kosher and some of us will buy the album anyway.
It's like Brownsville Girl:

Well, I'm standin' in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck,
Yeah, but you know it's not the one that I had in mind.
He's got a new one out now, I don't even know what it's about
But I'll see him in anything so I'll stand in line.


Lousy cover though...

Kidnapped

Everyone seems to have discovered Wordle all of a sudden. The Guardian Media section has a Wordle graphic of the Press Complaints Commission on its front page (sadly not available online).
So, with no apologies, I give you the first chapter of Kidnapped by RLS wordled.

Attribution: Kidnappled by RLL , http://www.wordle.net/ under a Creative Commons licence.

Passing the time on Planet Earth.

Using Moodle...properly

We all, well, we all in FE, use Moodle don't we? For what? Loading up endless lecture notes. Which kinda misses the point. You can do an awful lot more and this book will show you how. You can even embed it in your Moodle courses. Now isn't that clever?!

Open publication - Free publishing - More book

The second edtion of the O'Reilly book "Using Moodle" by Jason Cole and Helen Foster. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License.

The Apprentice?

Just remember as you tune into this reality show (as in entertainment) what Sir (as in Sir Fred Goodwin) Alan Sugar had to say about us fools in F.E. Colleges are, according to Sir Alan "where dummkopfs come to learn where to make mistakes".

Dummkopfs perhaps, given the amount of money which FE has spent on his seriously-crap Viglen PCs.

Full BBC story here.

Suggested alternative viewing - Only Fools and Horses on Gold. Same business ethics but funnier...

Image: Alan Sugar's Car by Nick Treby at Flickr (CC Licence)

Free stock photographs

We keep getting asked for sources of photographs to be used in educational materials - Moodle, worksheets, etc. (The lazy option is of course to use Google Image search and sod the consequences).
Thus I'm putting together a package for my academic colleagues which will hopefully return them to the straight and narrow. So we might as well share them with you, dear reader.
All of the sites mentioned here offer varying collections of royalty-free, copyright-free, Creative Commons, public domain, etc. images. Generally, all that is required is an attribution which, after all, is common courtesy.
I'll have to admit that the site that I use most is Flickr and the easiest way to find Creative Commons photographs there is to use FlickrCC which is a Flickr CC search engine written by Peter Shanks. A very good place to start.
Anyway, these sites might just keep the Intellectual Property Police off your case:

• stock.xchng
• Open Stock Photography
• Geek Philosopher
• NASA Image eXchange (NIX)
• FreePixels
• Studio 25
• Image*After
• Everystockphoto (search engine)
• openphoto.net

And if that's not enough, Intute produced an tutorial, Internet for Image Searching. Send them back to class!

And lest we forget, the above image is Class Room by cobrasoft via stock.xchang used under licence.

Managing the complexities of the digital economy...

This advert for an IT company appeals, not because I like cats (and I do) but because unfortunately it's what we have to deal with (metaphorically) on a daily basis. Here, puss puss. Nice techie / technophobe (delete as in/appropriate)...

Source: Joe Wilson

Google Maps - Street View UK

Google has at last launched the Street View "version" of Google Maps in the UK.
Potential educational uses? Well, how about Glasgow Street Sculpture? Or, better still, a virtual pub-crawl? Why not start here - we usually did.
The Scottish bits are limited to Glasgow and Edinburgh at present - having seen the Google-mobile in Inverness & Forres on last year's return to civilisation I suspect (hope) that this coverage will grow.
You'll know when Street View is available when the wee man in the Maps navigation bar turns yellow. Drag him onto the map and a blue grid of the views available becomes visible. It's all pretty straight-forward after that. Except for turning the corners.

http://maps.google.com/

Source: Download Squad

BBC allows video embedding

Sadly this does not mean that you can embed anything from the BBC iPlayer or, indeed from the BBC website on your blog or website. And the number of videos which allow this are, thus far, thin on the ground and restricted to the Technology section. Which is fair enough really.
There are restrictions too on where you can embed the material. Again this is reasonable. Full terms and conditions can be found here with full details of the embeddable player here.
I have to say that I like this although coverage needs to be wider & the URLs persistent. Time will tell.

Thanks to Andy Dickinson (http://www.andydickinson.net/) for this one.

Lost in the cloud...

Delicious getting a wee bit out of hand.



Still. Looks good.

Image courtesy the good people at http://www.wordle.net/

Watchmen : The Motion Comic

Have only watched the first episode of this but, but, I don't know. A grower maybe. The educational possibilities are endless (he blustered). ESOL anyone?

Available for $9.95 per episode or for £7.99 inclusive of postage at Play.com. You choose...

World Book Day 2009

Forgot all about this. Excuse = it's a public library deal. Excuse = Up to eyes in OpenAthens LA 2.0.

"Anyway, by way of recompense, here's a downloadable e-book (i.e. pdf) of Sean Williams' The Crooked Letter.

"For those who aren't familiar with it, The Crooked Letter is kinda urban New Weird on a massive scale. It's been compared to China Mieville, Philip Pullman, Ursula K Le Guin, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, yada yada, and it won both the Aurealis and Ditmar Awards the year it was released".

http://ladnews.livejournal.com/112580.html

So, it's the 2002 logo...

It was 25 years ago today...

The start of the Miners' Strike.

If you're too young to remember, and you're never to young to find out, try the Justice for Mineworkers Campaign website - http://www.justiceformineworkers.org.uk/

Fairtrade Fortnight 2009

One we prepared earlier...
Since the requests of Monsignor Reilly seem to have been roundly ignored by the leaders of our educational emporium (Nestle anyone?), here's a selection of Fairtrade related videos from YouTube. All neatly tied up in an Embedr gift-wrap. Yes, I know thatwe're in the middle (middle?) of a recession but I think that this is meant to be global. Or does the developing world not count in these times? Less to lose I suppose.

Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com

So what does it all mean...?

Another one of those viral videos that pose a lot of questions but offer no answers. Anyway, there are no answers because ultimately it's all meaningless. Still, if it makes you feel like a philosopher for 5 minutes & 16 seconds, perhaps that's no bad thing...

Remembering the Big Bopper...

In all the 50th anniversary of "The Day The Music Died" celebrations, much has been (rightly) said, read & written about Buddy Holly; less so Ritchie Valens & The Big Bopper (Jiles "Jape" Richardson Jr). And to these ears at least, apart from the work of Mr. Charles Berry, Chantilly Lace just about wraps up everything you might need to know about the spirit of Rock 'n' Roll. So Arkive proudly presents:



An afterthought. The Big Bopper was only on the 'plane because Buddy Holly's bass-player gave up his seat for him. One Waylon Jennings. Spooky...

Embedr - "makes videos play nice"

Embedr. This one's popped up on quite a few blogs of late and, for once perhaps, I'm impressed. Why? Because it's a neat way to aggregate videos from a variety of sources into a neat package that doesn't run way, way, way down that web-page.

• Create an account (you don't have to but it helps);
• Create a playlist from YouTube (or from a long list of other video-sharing sites such as TeacherTube);
• Save the playlist & embed the HTML code into your web-page, blog, Moodle, Joomla!, whatever.

The widget below was created by Embedr using the CommonCraft social media videos from YouTube. Time taken about 15 minutes. Excellent. And free. We like free in FE! Joomla! users - turn off that WYSIWYG editor!

Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com

It Ain't Dark Yet...

Seems like this is becoming a repository for the obituaries of, well, musical heroes, for want of a better phrase. No exception John Martyn who lived the wild life so that we could too.





Guardian Obituary

John Martyn website

I don't want to know about evil, I only want to know about love...

Happy Birthday

Not much more needs to be said about the man, save he deserves more than the mealy-mouthed words of the middle classes every twelve-month. Or to be hijacked by Salmond et al for the "Year of Homecoming". See previous post.

Anyway, here's some good sites. The BBC one could be especially useful. OK, so the poems are read by the great & good but that is perhaps a little bit better than by some Grouse-fuelled banker from Bridge of Allan.

Robert Burns (BBC Scotland)
The complete canon (eventually) read by the aforementioned great-and-good.

National Burns Collection
Discover Burns close-up through our on-line gallery, virtual tours of the homes and haunts of the poet, and a wealth of poetry and songs.

Robert Burns' Letters
Blog which publishes the letters of Burns on the days which they were written.

Poems & Songs (Bartleby)
557 works with a glossary of over 1,900 words and phrases.

Robert Burns Interactive
What mair div ye need?

Image courtesy Joe Wilson at Experimental Blog

A History of The Internet

Very good animated history of the internet.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.