Grids and Gestures

Posted on 11th April 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Today Nick Sousanis has teamed up with the Daily Create folk to introduce his Grids and Gestures activity. In this, he asks us to:

… take a single sheet of paper (any size, shape will do) and drawing with a pencil or pen, carve it up in some grid-esque fashion that represents the shape of your day… The emphasis here is to do your best to not draw things.

I found it very hard not to draw things. Funny, because I usually doodle shapes and not things, but suddenly I wanted to draw ukes, and daffodils, and yarn. Still, I tried to resist, and here’s my representation of yesterday:

IMG_0391

I woke to sound of a cat purring on my shoulder and a cuppa from Niall. Played music and looked at the flowers in the garden in the morning before being driven to the mum-in-laws for lunch then knitting. Driven home, folded washing, tidied paperwork, more music. Then TV dinner before bed. The last thing I recall is Lacey cat curling up in her bed at my feet.  Bliss.

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Not-ness

Posted on 3rd April 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Inspired by Amy Collier and Jen Ross’s stuff about not yet-ness, I’ve come up with some of my own reactions, which I will use as appropriate in my day job as a learning tech.*

  1. Not on your nelly-ness. AKA over my dead body-ness or (Glasgow variation) Aye-Right-Ness.

nellyness

2. Not on my watch-ness. AKA Woah – have you thought that through-ness?

watchness

3. Not bloody likely-ness. AKA you’re joking, right-ness.

fishness

Feel free to use and share 😉

* Please note that I am not taking the Mickey out of the concept of not yet-ness, but wringing my hands at some of the situations I find myself in.

Donkey pic by Tim Green shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Watchman pic by legofenris shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Fish pic by Newtown Grafitti shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

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Don’t play nice

Posted on 3rd April 2016 by NomadWarMachine

What a noise!

The teacher sighed and put down her pince nez. Michael Gove’s book would have to wait for another day.

Play nice children

She shouted across the playground.

We don’t want anybody getting hurt.

Conform, comply. That’s what she meant.

*************************************

What a racket!  Why will these kids not stop bickering?

The teacher sighed again and turned around from the board.

Children  – what have I told you? If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. We don’t want anybody getting upset.

Conform, comply, agree. Don’t challenge. No hard questions, please. Some people have been here for a VERY LONG time and they must not be upset.

*******************************************

The teacher turned back to the board.

Mantra time, children

She said

Repeat after me. The community is the…

Some of the children joined in. They liked this game – they played it a lot. Nice and safe. Everybody agreeing. No need to worry about whether it was right or wrong.  No need for silly concepts of right or wrong. Just pretty words, and everybody playing nicely.

*************************************

Suddenly the door crashed open. The children blinked.  Silhouetted in the doorway was a figure with a shock of hair, singing loudly.

Hello

He shouted loudly

I’ve been listening to what you’ve been saying and watching what you’ve been doing. Can I ask you some questions?

Most of the children started cheering – this was more like it. They started to chat to the newcomer.

The teacher began to intervene

Ummmm, this is a bit hard, somebody might get upset …

She tried to say. but the other kids ignored her. So she left them to it. After all, who was she to tell them what they should or should not talk about?

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Echo Chamber

Posted on 2nd April 2016 by NomadWarMachine

I don’t want to live in an echo chamber

Participants in online communities may find their own opinions constantly echoed back to them, which reinforces their individual belief systems. This can create significant barriers to critical discourse within an online medium. Wikipedia

I don’t want to live in an echo chamber

…the echo chamber effect reinforces one’s own present world view, making it seem more correct and more universally accepted than it really is. Ibid

I don’t want to live in an echo chamber

Another emerging term for this echoing and homogenizing effect on the Internet within social communities is cultural tribalism. Ibid

I don’t want to be part of a homogeneous tribe

flock of sheep

I don’t identify as part of a swarm

swarm of ants

I don’t need anybody to speak on my behalf

Lorikeet

I don’t want to live in an echo chamber.

Right-wing media has a noted effect on shaping its viewers perceptions.The conservative media echo chamber has been partly responsible for the rise of Donald Trump, by consistently providing a platform for his ideas and defending him when attacked. In addition, conservative media has created the environment where presidential candidates feel comfortable enough to claim that the media has a liberal bias and therefore shouldn’t be trusted. This leads candidates to mold their candidacies towards what those who listen to conservative media want to hear and parrot popular conservative media hosts ideas and rhetoric. Media Matters

I don’t want to live in an echo chamber

if algorithms are going to curate the world for us … then we need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important Eli Pariser

Give me pretty bubbles, not filter bubbles.

Soap bubbles

Sheep pic by James Good shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Ant pic by Troy Tolley shared under a Creative Commons (BY-ND) license

Parrot pic by Nathan Rupert shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Bubbles pic by Kim Scott-0  shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

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Calligrams

Posted on 26th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s daily create is  to make a calligram: “to to visualize the meaning of a word, using only the graphic elements of the letters forming the word.” as Ji Lee says. Here’s a couple I created by changing the transparency of letters in Powerpoint.

Words becoming and vanishing

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Bursting

Posted on 26th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Yesterday was a beautiful spring day – blue skies and weather almost warm enough to start thinking about barbecues. Niall started cleaning off the patio slabs and I grabbed my camera and took a couple of pics. Here’s our forsythia bush starting to flower and one of our plum trees starting to show buds.

forsythia flower plum tree buds

I was delighted, then, when I saw that Kim’s latest photo challenge was:

Be on the lookout for bursts this week…and share what you find with the rest of us!  I can’t wait to see the bursts in your life.

We have a lot of weeding to do before we plant some brassicas – here’s one of my garden ornaments peeping out of the weeds:

IMG_0351

How’s your garden coming along?

All pics by me shared under a CC-BY-SA-NC licence

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Rhizome: 7 word story

Posted on 25th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s daily create is to:

Explain something technical in 24 seconds and summarize in 7 words as a video.

I wanted to try something new, so I Googled for animated text and found FlashVortex and quickly made these to – ahem – illustrate a point I keep banging on about:

Which are great, but not limited to 24 seconds. So I downloaded Screencast-o-matic (couldn’t get it to download to run in my browser, so downloaded the full version and extracted it onto my PC), played the animation and recorded it for 24 seconds. I then uploaded it to Youtube, realised the advertising was obscuring the text, recorded it again and re-uploaded it (dang, it’s 25 secs, pfff). That was fun 🙂

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#CERE16 chat

Posted on 19th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

tweey-bird
tweey-bird flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

This Tuesday 22nd March, at 5-6pm GMT, Steve Draper‘s Concepts and Empirical Research in Education (CERE) course is going to be holding a Tweetchat with the hashtag #CERE16, and I’ll be facilitating. The question that we’ll be responding to is this:

What is the most interesting/controversial/idiotic thing that you’ve read/heard about during this course?

If you’d like to join us (and I really, really hope that you will), please feel free to adapt this question. The list of CERE topics is here – you’ll find good topics such as social constructivism and learning as acquisition for example. For anybody who does not have a Twitter account, details of how to sign up are here. (Best to do this beforehand.) I’ll be tweeting, as usual as @NomadWarMachine

Flickr pic by me shared under a CC-BY-SA-NC licence

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Never Throw Tapioca Down a Mine Shaft

Posted on 18th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s Daily Create asks us to:

Create or write something to explain the origins of this aphorism: “Never throw tapioca down a mine shaft.”

I don’t think it’s a well known aphorism, at least not in English, so I don’t know the actual origins of the saying, but hey ho.

When I was a kid our school lunches were pretty dire, but there was one we really, really dreaded – tapioca pudding – or frogspawn as we called it. The thought of this still makes me shudder. Despite this, I love frogs – here’s a pic from my office wall:

frogspawn

As I was surfing for inspiration I came across the phrase “frog in a well” – another new one for me. Apparently this means to be narrow minded. So I’m going to suggest, with no evidence whatsoever, that you shouldn’t throw tapioca (frogspawn) down a mineshaft (well) because you’ll end up with narrow minded frogs (workers). To be sung to the tune of “You cannae shove yer grannie aff the bus” 😉


Flickr photo by me shared under a CC-BY-SA-NC licence

 

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Burying my demons

Posted on 16th March 2016 by NomadWarMachine

Today’s DS106 Daily Create is to create a tombstone. It’s hard to know what to choose – so many worthy candidates – but we’ve had a rough few days of it in the office so the first one I chose was this:

BBB

which I made quickly with Tombstone Builder Then I made this:

my_tombstone (1)

To “celebrate” our government. Happy days 🙁

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