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Some things I can’t do on the ipad 2 yet.

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Talk About Local Unconference to take place in Cardiff

I’ve been asked if there are any more image editing tutorials after having published image editing lesson 1 layers and image editing lesson 2 the clone tool so here’s lesson 3 which looks at the colour select tool. The use of gradients is also introduced at a beginners level. Seashore free image editing software for Mac is free and open source, it fills a sizeable niche doing much more than iPhoto but being simpler and a lot less expensive than photoshop.

If you’d like to try this exercise using the same example you may download the picture used below in various sizes from the Flickr photo page.

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Image Editing 3 : Colour Select with Seashore for Mac

One simple use of the clone toolis to extend some background over part of an image that doesn’t fit in, effectively making some obtrusive feature vanish. The limitations to this are that the background has to be something relatively uniform. If you want to try your hand at editing the photograph used as an example in this tutorial then you will find it here on Flickr with a creative commons license that allows derivatives to be made and published, with attribution.

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Image Editing lesson 2 : The Clone Tool

Seashore image editing Video

On request I’ve made some Image editing tutorial videos and this is the first in a series of at least five. Lesson one is an introduction to using Layers. Layers are essential to the construction of drawings and can be used in a similar way when building up effects onto photographs. They make it much easier to come back and change or redo image effects later by leaving each stage intact – a process called non-destructive editing. Anyway, here’s the video from youtube, I hope you will bear with me and keep watching, it gets much more useful after a bit of a slow start I know that – and your comments and reviews are very welcome both here and on the youTube page.

The software I’m using is called Seashore and it’s an open source image editor for Mac using the native Cocoa interface, so it feels like a proper Mac application, not a migrated one.

You can download this free software from Seashore at Sourceforge. If you find that iPhoto doesn’t do all that you want and photoshop is just too big and cumbersome then Seashore could be the image editing application to get you started on acquiring some really useful skills.

The next four tutorials will cover:

• Using the clone tool effectively
• Selecting colours and applying changes
• How to photograph a ghost
• Subtle use of tinting

If you’d like to receive notice when these are published then you need to subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog and join the newsletter (see sidebar)

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Image Editing Lesson 1 : Layers

explore school of everything

Upon arrival at the school of everything homepage, you are greeted with the simple slogan in large bold type “Learn more”

and then you get the chance to either sign up as a person, or as a teacher.

Within the UK, this might provide a vibrant alternative for all sorts of learning which are no longer covered by the run down local authorities’ adult education sectors. The school of everything also has ambitions to become a well populated international website on the global startups scene.

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School Of Everything

In my understanding an RSS reader is a personal productivity tool, a way of organising the way a person works with their chosen reading matter. But people do not all consume information in the same way. Some like to organise everything into neat folders, others prefer to have everything in one big pile with the latest at the top. Some like to quickly scan through everything and then deal with the most important first, others prefer to work through their incoming notifications one at a time. You get the picture. There are also preferences for the style of presentation, because some people have different eyesight capabilities. For different folk, certain styles and coloured fonts work better than others or they need specific colour backgrounds to work from. Some like three panes visible at once, others a single paned window. Some work with one highly customised computer, others need to be able to log in from anywhere on a variety of machines.

So I can’t work out yet what would really be the problem facing an Enterprise IT department if people were allowed to choose for themselves which RSS reader they prefer to use. What are the benefits of standardisation, and to whom?

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Enterprise RSS?

Voting rules:

1. Voting starts on 15 September 2005 at 00:00 UTC. You can still translate the voting instructions and the proposal page into other languages after the start of voting.

2. To vote, you need a registered account here on Meta with a link on your meta user page to the user page on the wiki you edit most.

3. Voting will end on 1 November 2005 at 00:00 UTC (voting may be extended one week if deemed necessary).

4. The proposal needs a two thirds (2/3) super-majority in favor in order to be passed to the board for consideration to start as a beta project (the higher the support, the shorter the ensuing beta period will be).

5. If, after one week of voting, there is more than 90% of overall agreement, and more than 10 votes, the project can be launched immediately, pending approval of the Foundation board.

6. NOTE: This is a vote to determine if Wikiversity should be started as a Wikimedia project at all in any language. Whether or not Wikiversity will be started in your language will be determined separately if this vote succeeds and if the board approves the project.

You can only vote once. Please read the full Wikiversity proposal before voting. You can ask questions about Wikiversity on the #Wikiversity IRC channel (irc.freenode.net). If this vote is successful and the board approves the creation of this project, then de.wikiversity.org and en.wikiversity.org will be launched as experimental pilots. After 6 months the board will review the progress of these pilots and determine if they should become beta projects, shut down, or if the pilot period should be extended. If the board approves Wikiversity as a beta project, then at that point other language versions could be launched as betas. Existing Wikiversity projects in languages other than English and German will continue on Wikibooks as a temporary home, and development can continue there until after this beta period is over. No new Wikiversity projects should be started in other languages on Wikibooks. During the voting period you may change your vote. If you choose to do so, please remove your previous vote. Voting both yes and no will be removed from both.

Should we launch the Wikiversity project as described on Wikiversity?

Please indicate by your vote if you would be interested in participating in this project

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to Wikiversity or not to Wikiversity? Vote now.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wiki/

but then I decided I’d like to have another go at allowing the Googlebot to index some of the really useful content which has been building up there recently, so I removed the robots.txt file for a few days and monitored carefully.

What appears to be happening is that the googlebot visits about once per day and spiders a little further down into the Wiki each day, but using up an ever increasing amount of bandwidth as it does so – not good. So the list of french cider producers can already be searched for, but the Asturian Campsites – not as yet.

My own webstats and research told me that Googlebot can get caught up in a wiki site, spidering all of the previous versions, page history, user contributions and so on, and if you are paying for the remote hosting then this needs to be avoided. So rather than disallow /wiki/ I’ve disallowed “oldid” and “contributions” for now, and maybe I’ll tweak it a bit later or go fishing for the definitive mediawiki (not pretty URLs) robots.txt configuration. Meanwhile in my travels, I came across a reference to Google sitemaps which should allow me to tame the over eager googlebot some more. I’ve included data to the effect that the site is updated weekly, which should help towards my goal of having deep-linked pages listed on search results without having all the bandwidth used up by spiders.

Googlebot is not the only search engine spider, there are many others ( such as the enigmatically named “inktomi slurp” it’s just that the Gb is probably the most important and also the most resource consuming.

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Robots.txt, mediawiki and Google Sitemap

Working Title: Busking for improvement

Context:

It’s two months since my short term contract at Marsdon School wasn’t renewed, and there’s no sign of any fees coming in from my new IT consultancy business yet, so in desperate need of a bit of liquidity, the clock turns back thirty years: I picked up my old guitar and headed down town to work as an itenerant street singer (busker)

The Problem:

Busking in London is hard work so: how can I increase revenue and play less hours while still paying the bills?

Action:

I will make a series of busking expeditions each of a fixed time, trying out different techniques which I think might increase the takings. Based on an assumption that I perform best when I’m enjoying the songs I will also record how I’m feeling about the session every 10 minutes or 3 songs (qualitative) as well as counting the money, both in total and as sets of different denomination coins. (quantitative)

Participation:

In a further cycle of the enquiry I will employ the services of an assistant whose job is to hold the hat and collect the money (a bottler). The bottler will be invited to make suggestions for further cycles and we may make joint decisions on the fly about the playlist according to which songs appear to be going down well (emergent action). With adequate assistance it may be possible to collect video data as well. By convention, the takings will be split 50/50.

Audience:

The exhibition will be presented live to a populous but frequently changing audience of strangers, so I will need to have good mechanisms in place for collecting feedback data from a small self-selected volunteer sample of people who are willing to stop and leave comments.

Literature Review:

None, because “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (Zappa, 1974)

Potential for further cycles.

Plenty. For example the location could be changed to Paris (via Eurostar) or the entire music element could be dropped and replaced with an empty vodka bottle and a dog on a piece of string to see if takings go up or down.

Ethics:

In consideration for audience sensitivities there will be no Simon and Garfunkel.

Tachnorati Tags:
ultraversity,
busking, actionresearch,
music

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BA (Hons) Busking

by McNiff, Lomax and Whitehead

is recommended by Eve in preference to Robson.

available from Amazon both new and second hand

ultraversity

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You and your action research project

“All folders you create in your File Cabinet are ‘ghost’ folders – they don’t really exist. Folders are for you to help you organise your work. If you upload documents with the same name, the latter upload will replace the older.”
[..]
“As I said above, folders are not real items; use different names for your documents otherwise your older work will be overwritten by the newer upload.”

The implications of this may not have sunk in to everybody at Ultraversity yet.

Say you create a folder and call it MODULE-1

then upload some work into waht you think is MODULE-1/intro
MODULE-1/main and MODULE-1/conclusions

You hand that in to be marked, then start work on module 2.

If you create another folder called ACTION_ENQUIRY-1 and then upload a file into it called “intro” it will overwrite the file called “intro” which you thought was all safely tucked away in MODULE-1. You may well not notice this. The person marking your work might not even notice, and you get back a coversheet which says “This work is good in parts, but doesn’t hang together very well”.

Pretty serious, huh? Or maybe the explanation from technical support is all wrong, in which case somebody will let me know and I’ll delete this entry.

ultraversity

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ALERT e-portfolio problem

The other interesting idea in the Open Source show was when Weinberger talked about how even our conception of a document has to change, how for hundreds of years we’ve thought of a report or a story as a container of information. But now, with hypertext, a document’s value comes not so much from what it holds but from where it points out of itself to others. I think the reality is that we’re going to have to start teaching students to give research back to us in a web-ified form, complete with links. In five years when we’ve moved beyond paper, hypertext writing (read “blogging”) is going to be a basic literacy. The final mile will be to publish all of that writing in a public blog/portfolio space. Then we’ll be cranking…

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hypertext as literacy

It’s called Real World Research by Colin Robson, and you can buy it from Amazon below – they’ve reduced the price to £14.99 now, which is just as well:

ultraversity

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Real World Research

Here are my notes, copied straight out of my Peanut Butter Wiki.

This afternoon’s year 3 lessons will be particularly interesting to me – I’ve set up a discussion blog for them, as an introduction to the email unit.

So it’ll be the first time that a blog has been incorporated into the formal teaching here – a taste of things to come. I’ll try to observe well and take notes.

What happened:

For the first lesson, the children came in and went straight to the computers. They had already been shown how to navigate to the blog and post a comment using the whiteboard in their classroom. They started off well and didn’t need much technical help. My notes say:

T1 pointed out no need to write “my name is”

some children wanted to jump up and and look at each others computers – they were told off.

They asked how to spell words a lot.

We explained how to have a conversation by mentioning somebody’s name and asking a question.

behaviour and attention (focus) was very good – all on task.

Use of refresh button explained, to read the new comments.

A comment appeared from t2 not in the room, so I went to see if they were using the whiteboard in the classroom – they were following the comments there.

By the end of the lesson there were 114 comments. I asked 1 child ‘how does this compare with Word Processing” answer “wicked”.

—-

I decided to set up a new entry for the second class to comment on, so they can start afresh or join in the previous class discussion.

2nd class arrived and sat on carpet.

t2 talked about communications, about email, about the advantage of being able to connect to anybody in the world. Then a demo.

Children needed more support to get started

one complained about the writing in the input box “it’s too small”

The 2 teachers interacted from between the two rooms and had fun.

behaviour in this lesson was a bit chaotic, excitement , moving about the room but T2 is ok with that.

by the end of the lesson there were 79 comments posted and 16 additions to the other classes thread.
—

what else do I remember?

Thinking ‘this would be good for afterschool literacy club”

asking children what they thought of it – answers – ‘good!”

No behaviour/discipline problems, while the teachers are enjoying themselves.

No problems with the blog host coping with rapid fire commenting, or with people generally understanding the system. No problems with unsuitable language etc either so far, just a slight niggle with having to switch away from registered users comments to ‘other’ in order to simply type in a name and post.

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School Blogging

tagged: ultraversity

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No Smiling Day

SAT graders are told to read an essay just once and spend two to three minutes per essay, and Dr. Perelman is now adept at rapid-fire SAT grading. This reporter held up a sample essay far enough away so it could not be read, and he was still able to guess the correct grade by its bulk and shape. “That’s a 4,” he said. “It looks like a 4.”

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Could be worse!

Quoting

This is the first question which is asked in the Assessment cover sheet:

Sometimes I found it difficult to know when you were talking about someone else’s ideas and when you were talking about your own ideas- eg on your blog when talking about Wenger’s ideas on CoP you merely supply a link to his website then list some paragraphs outlining what CoPs could be – some ideas seem to be his, some yours. But it’s hard for me to tell. Could you keep this in mind?

This sounds valid, I wouldn’t want to be quoting something to illustate an idea with which I disagree only for the reader to mistake it for my own views. But let’s examine the only example given, the review of Wenger on COPs which appears in my blog entry COP part 1. The quote from Wenger’s website is introduced in the following way…

Etienne Wenger defines COPS thus

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better. etc etc

So we have the word “thus” followed by an indented paragraph which contains text from the very website linked to. That’s a very common way to quote from other sites, almost a standard. It’s pretty obvious those are Wenger’s words and not mine, how much clearer does it have to be? Subsequently in that blog series, I describe various communities with which I am familar and how they relate to Wenger’s definition, discuss possible problems with Wenger’s criteria, and pose the idea of ‘communities of identity’ which are not COPs. Those are my ideas, it’s me, writing on my blog, not quoting anybody. If somebody is still confused by that, I don’t think there’s much more I can do for them.

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Assessment assessment – part 6

Comment One – Linda Hartley

Hi all

In Andy’s feedback Gina suggests that this might be the start of a discussion:

Ability to relate theory to practice.

Excellent – I can see clearly how you have absorbed the reading you have done into the work you carried out in creating a wiki. I can appreciate the time you have spent in expressing your thoughts and emerging ideas in different media

I am not aware of Andy using a wide range of media to explore his ideas, just the blog and 43Things in this instance. These are just web sites – one form of media or am I missing something? Personally I used blog, 43Things, and quicktime movies stored on my FC web space. Eve what do you think?

– I find this at times a challenging way for me to piece together your thoughts- I’d venture to say it’s easier for a reader to take in an author’s ideas if he or she doesn’t have to visit many places to read those ideas.

Perhaps you have a different view of the internet to mine. I am not so aware of a sense of movement between spaces when I click a link as you seem to be. I find it easy to thread the whole together and follow Andy’s meaning usually.

Having said that, when I come back to your work for the second time, I come with a sense of seeing your ideas unfold and develop. I’m always going to waver on this point – should your ideas be in one place with clear headings in a more conventional format, or is your work a valid way of using media in a fresh and more accessible way? I can’t answer it. I’d just like to work less hard sometimes when taking on your ideas.

Is it wrong to make the reader work hard? Should we be considering this in our presentation of the work? I’m not so sure. Maybe the reader needs to concentrate and stretch their mind to understand the work, does this make it a bad piece of work? Is easy better?

I may have to concentrate to understand Andy’s meaning sometimes. I have to do that when I read anythng serious. I hope people give my work similar sort of attention.

It would be good to have a continuing dialogue about this- perhaps assessment ought to be more of a dialogue that a one sided judgement. I’d be interested in how your very capable peer reviewers found reading your work.

So what do we think on this point?

Personally I’m not sure that there’s a qualative difference between Andy’s work and mine and Eve’s. We all tend to use a ‘patchwork’ from various sources or spheres where we are active on the web (blog, 43Things, stuff stored on FC webspace, even sometimes comments on other people’s blogs.)

Does it make our work harder to mark? Quite possibly, certainly you can’t easily print off our work and read it. or copy it to cd. But then we are doing a ’100% on-line degree’.

However read on-line, with reasonable attention paid I usually understand what Andy’s meaning is. I dont’ find it any harder or easier to follow than Eve’s work usually.

I know that Gina won’t feel able to look at my work or yours Eve but perhaps the knowledge that we got 79% and 78% respectively and used not disimmilar methods to present our work might be of interest.

Linda Hartley (Cohort 1)

Comment Two – Eve Thirkle

Linda Hartley on 29 April 2005 at 22:09 +0000 wrote:

Hi all

In Andy’s feedback Gina suggests that this might be the start of a discussion:

That’ll teach me to check in here while printing off directions! Some quick feedback and more to follow whenI’ve had a think!

Ability to relate theory to practice.

Excellent – I can see clearly how you have absorbed the reading you have done into the work you carried out in creating a wiki. I can appreciate the time you have spent in expressing your thoughts and emerging ideas in different media

I am not aware of Andy using a wide range of media to explore his ideas, just the blog and 43Things in this instance. These are just web sites – one form of media or am I missing something? No I’m with you there on that – all websites – but perhaps with a different ‘utility’ they appear to be different media? Personally I used blog, 43Things, and quicktime movies stored on my FC web space. Eve what do you think? I used blog, referrred to 43 in the peer bit and also the movies plus pictures.

– I find this at times a challenging way for me to piece together your thoughts- I’d venture to say it’s easier for a reader to take in an author’s ideas if he or she doesn’t have to visit many places to read those ideas.

Perhaps you have a different view of the internet to mine. I am not so aware of a sense of movement between spaces when I click a link as you seem to be. I find it easy to thread the whole together and follow Andy’s meaning usually.

I’ve done the whole of my LIWPS2 as a website – there are many links and pages and also ‘back’ referrering links to present a coherent whole – any links that are external to my work I have put to open in a new window so that it doesn’t detract from my main presentation – possibly something to think about? Andy’s work is fine as far as I am concerned.

Having said that, when I come back to your work for the second time, I come with a sense of seeing your ideas unfold and develop. I’m always going to waver on this point – should your ideas be in one place with clear headings in a more conventional format, or is your work a valid way of using media in a fresh and more accessible way? I can’t answer it. I’d just like to work less hard sometimes when taking on your ideas.

Is it wrong to make the reader work hard? Why is it hard work? Should we be considering this in our presentation of the work? Possibly – if the hard work puts people off – I found it hard to follow the pdf you sent recently for peer review – but I find lots of words hard work. – perhaps the answer is to have a different option to choose and present it three ways but … probably not at this level.I’m not so sure. Maybe the reader needs to concentrate and stretch their mind to understand the work, does this make it a bad piece of work? Is easy better?

I may have to concentrate to understand Andy’s meaning sometimes. I have to do that when I read anythng serious. I hope people give my work similar sort of attention.Ditto

It would be good to have a continuing dialogue about this- perhaps assessment ought to be more of a dialogue that a one sided judgement. I’d be interested in how your very capable peer reviewers found reading your work.

So what do we think on this point?

Personally I’m not sure that there’s a qualative difference between Andy’s work and mine and Eve’s. We all tend to use a ‘patchwork’ from various sources or spheres where we are active on the web (blog, 43Things, stuff stored on FC webspace, even sometimes comments on other people’s blogs.) I can’t understand the differences sometimes – we’re all working at a similar level – the whole idea of the La’s was to avoid writing a 4000 word report – we weave the LA’s together to form a coherent whole – is the problem in the weaving or are we following the wrong pattern altogether?

Does it make our work harder to mark? Quite possibly, certainly you can’t easily print off our work and read it. or copy it to cd. But then we are doing a ’100% on-line degree’.

However read on-line, with reasonable attention paid I usually understand what Andy’s meaning is. I dont’ find it any harder or easier to follow than Eve’s work usually.

I know that Gina won’t feel able to look at my work or yours Eve but perhaps the knowledge that we got 79% and 78% respectively and used not disimmilar methods to present our work might be of interest.

Gina’s welcome to loook at mine if she wants to see a comparator – not for comments obviously as we’ve had that discussion before.

I will look with interest on Monday to see how full my inbox is!

Eve

[Cohort 1]

“Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly.” — Arnold Edinborough

“Research is what I do when I don’t know what I’m doing.” — Wernher Von Braun

http://firstclass.ultraversity.net/~eve.thirkle/

http://evet.blogdrive.com

http://www.furl.net/members/EveT

I am quite happy to be quoted and for the quote to be attributed to me. Please do not anonymise me.

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Assessment assessment – part 4

LEARNING FACILITATOR Comments

Select and negotiate appropriate tasks. Meet learning objectives.

Excellent – You have met all learning objectives for this module to a high standard.

Ability to take responsibility for own learning.

Excellent – you excel in this also.

Ability to relate theory to practice.

Excellent – I can see clearly how you have absorbed the reading you have done into the work you carried out in creating a wiki. I can appreciate the time you have spent in expressing your thoughts and emerging ideas in different media – I find this at times a challenging way for me to piece together your thoughts- I’d venture to say it’s easier for a reader to take in an author’s ideas if he or she doesn’t have to visit many places to read those ideas. Having said that, when I come back to your work for the second time, I come with a sense of seeing your ideas unfold and develop. I’m always going to waver on this point – should your ideas be in one place with clear headings in a more conventional format, or is your work a valid way of using media in a fresh and more accessible way? I can’t answer it. I’d just like to work less hard sometimes when taking on your ideas. It would be good to have a continuing dialogue about this- perhaps assessment ought to be more of a dialogue that a one sided judgement. I’d be interested in how your very capable peer reviewers found reading your work.
The first thing to come up is this question of “different media”. Now, I have in the past made use of video, audio, animation – ultraversity used to encourage this – but in this particular report i didn’t use any of these – it’s all just text with some minimal graphics and one monochrome diagram. And the main body of the report is all presented as one long HTML document, formatted exactly as prescribed by the imposed Action Research tool, such as it is. So I don’t accept that I have in any way bamboozled the reader with a baffling mixture of media because it simply isn’t true. Perhaps the word media is being employed as in ‘Through the Looking Glass”

`When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

Then we get the complaint about having to ‘visit many places’. Being a webpage, the Action Enquiry tool allows the inclusion of HTML code such as hypertext links. It doesn’t really matter whether you visit the official Action Enquiry tool, or the version which I have published on my coursework website, they are practically identical. Both contain the same links, links to the learning activities, goals, reflections, peer review and blog entries which tghe reader can optionally explore as far as they wish. This website format is something which I have used right from the very start of year one, with encouragement, and yet suddenly it is being criticised as too hard work for the poor marker. The question is even raised that it may not be valid. “is your work a valid way … I can’t answer it”

As for suggesting an alternative with clear headings, well the headings used are exactly as directed by the imposed Action Enquiry tool pro forma so what on earth is that supposed to mean? I have indeed submitted a report the main part of which is all in one document ( not that I would agree to always to keep to that , a series of linked pages may be more effective sometimes ) and uses the prescribed headings but the one which has been assessed is bafflingly described as something completely different.

So it was suggested that there should be a continuing dialogue, including my peer review partners, which we tried to have, but then it turned out that “It would be good to have a continuing dialogue” doesn’t imply that it should actually happen at all. It was a mistake. Taking Humpty Dumpty to a new level, not just words but whole phrases and sentances can be paid off and made to mean whatever you want them to mean, or nothing at all.

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Assessment assessment – part 2