Technical Issues at Classroom Displays Blog
Update: The Classroom Displays Blog and usefulwiki.com are back on line
Happy Holidays to all 
Blogflowers
Saw this on Andy’s blog & couldn’t resist it! Is it a meme or something more useful? I’m not sure…… fun though This is the one for this blog:
And this is for Classroom Displays:
The site offers some explanation:
Rules for interpretation:
1. The same text will always generate the same flower.
2. More text will generate more layers of petals.
3. The primary topic will be shown using the associated colour on the outermost two layers of petals.
4. If there is a secondary topic it will be shown on the third layer of petals. This pattern repeats, two layers using the primary, then one with the secondary.
5. If there exists a tertiary topic its’ colour is used to accent the edges of some of the primary coloured petals.
6. The number of little ‘hairs’ on the flower is indicative of the number of personal pronouns used in the text.
7. Rounder petal shapes are suggestive of emotionally positive terms (love, yes, peace) , and more elongated terms indicate negative terms (death, murder, idiot).
Talkr
I’ve added Talkr to the Classroom Displays Blog. It claims to be a podcasting service but really it just produces an audio version of the rss feed for the blog. A real podcast would have to add extra material, I think.
I’ve enabled Talkr as a Wordpress plug-in over at edublogs as an experiment. It seems to work reasonably well. It occasionally reads ‘decorated’ as ‘degraded’ and the English spelling of ‘behaviour’ foxed it totally! Still as Classroom DIsplays is nominated for Best Audio and/or Visual Blog it seemed worthwhile to add an audio element Joking aside,the main thing it’s shown up so far is that I need to write shorter sentences and use more punctuation! I might give it a go here if I can persuade Andy to install the plug-in.
Playing with Drupal
Andy has set up an instalation of Drupal on DARnet to explore how it might be used by communities and I’ve been playing around with it. At first it seemed quite counter-intuitive and annoying. Of course I always feel a bit like that about new software :-). First I get grumpy and hate it, then I start to wonder why it won’t do all the things I want it to straight away. Finally I realise I’m having quite a lot of fun playing around with it seeing what it can do.
Andy’s set it up so that anyone who wants to try out Drupal can create themselves a log in and have a play. Why not join in?
I blog here and at the 
