keithpeter
toplap uk - live coding in the UK
our local(ish) live coders
web  linux 
58 minutes ago
Paper on bricolage programming « Alex McLean
Levi-Strauss hits the command line.
web  linux 
1 hour ago
All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses | Mute magazine
the inevitable theory paper... puredyne linux distribution
linux 
1 hour ago
Zero Dollar Laptop Workshops
Pretty good scheme of work for a short course here...
linux 
2 hours ago
puredyne
Live CD boots a linux operating system, a real time kernel, and quite a few sound and video applications. Arts Council funded...
linux 
3 hours ago
Math Study Skills – How To Use Your Textbook « George Woodbury’s Blogarithm
Looks ok as a short activity. Might help if people use different textbooks as well.
maths 
3 hours ago
Mathematics: w. ans: The Basic Skills: Amazon.co.uk: S. Llewellyn, A. Greer: Books
The 4th edition of what many maths teachers call the 'apple book' is still available second hand for the cost of postage from Amazon. The 4th and 5th editions were the last ones before the book was re-planned to fit the Adult Core Numeracy curriculum, and these earlier editions have the algebra and shape and space chapters. There is also a BASIC program to type into your BBC B+ :-)
maths  web 
6 hours ago
antrix.net :: Dropbox without Gnome
Very important information for KDE and the *box users.
linux 
21 hours ago
BBC News - Charles Darwin's ecological experiment on Ascension isle
"What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem" - ace
blogfodder  science 
22 hours ago
Archos announces five Android tablets • reghardware
Beginning of cheap tablets. I'm sure there will be a lot of models, and then the market will settle down to one or two sizes and specs. Could be good learning platforms if cheap enough for class sets...
web 
22 hours ago
In Defense of Links, Part Two: Money changes everything — Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard
"If you’re on a web page that’s weighted down with cross-promotional hand-waving, revenue-squeezing ad overload and interstitial interruptions, odds are you’re on a newspaper or magazine site." The ecology of hyperlinks. Via Mark Bernstein's blog
web 
yesterday
Why is Gmail automatically playing music? - Gmail Help
This isn't such a great idea
web 
2 days ago
Scripting News: A transparent change, but an important one
Here is an idea, synchronise the folder on this PC that holds the bash scripts and files that I publish bodmas.org with dropbox or Ubuntu One
web 
2 days ago
Scripting News: How I do the hand-drawn diagrams
Yes, Dave Winer has had to provide people with instructions on how to draw a diagram...
blogfodder 
2 days ago
Sky Chart for Birmingham
That big bright star low in the east around midnight is Jupiter
web 
3 days ago
Wordle - Numeracy teacher words
I fed a scheme of work I found on Maggie H's skillsworkshop.org into wordle... 'Revise' comes out huge! 'Life' is rather smaller, and 'experiments' is tiny. Wordle asks for a user name when you save a completed wordle to the gallery. These names are NOT unique, so I didn't do all the ones with Keith as the user name! I've just worked out how to convert wordles to WMFs so that you can put them into PowerPoints as scalable objects rather than bitmaps.
numeracy  learning 
7 days ago
Dave Norgate's Wordle vocabulary activities
Very nice, especially with Wordle live demo. Recognition of all those slightly different words and phrases we use to talk about the four functions.
numeracy 
7 days ago
Handbook to Elementary Social Studies
Hilda Taba's Inductive Strategy - see below in the context of Numeracy vocabulary
numeracy 
7 days ago
skillsworkshop Blog: Hilda Taba (part 2), Wordle, and numeracy
Wordle to explore Maths words
numeracy 
7 days ago
BBC News - Tech Know: BBC Micros used in retro programming class
I wrote a simple monochrome mandelbrot set program on a BBC B+ and it took three days to plot the contour. We had 5 of them in a study centre in the mid 90s and they had thousands of self-teach numeracy skills programs on 5.25 inch disks. Some bright spark IT manager decided they were obsolete.... we got brand new RM 386s with Windows - and no software apart from Office. So I wrote a load of Excel 3 spreadsheets...
web 
7 days ago
Recover Data Like a Forensics Expert Using an Ubuntu Live CD
Just in case. An Ubuntu Live CD can be a useful tool even if you like windows.
web  linux 
7 days ago
Solid-state lighting: an energy-economics perspective
LED lighting may just mean more photons and not less energy use.
blogfodder  maths 
8 days ago
Grant Goddard : radio blog: Download The First Annual Not ‘The Ofcom Digital Radio Progress Report’ Report
The presentation that can be downloaded as a PDF is interesting in itself, and also raises a few issues about the presentation of information in graphs.
blogfodder  maths 
9 days ago
YouTube - NMAWorldEdition's Channel
Via Daringfireball. I wish I could do stuff like this about Maths or learning theory.
Web 
9 days ago
Census 2001 - Population Pyramids - ENGLAND AND WALES
Roughly 52 million people in England and Wales
learning 
10 days ago
Full-time nursery & primary and secondary school teachers: by sex: Social Trends 34
Around half a million teachers in England and Wales if you include the FE sector
learning 
10 days ago
BBC News - Audio slideshow: 'The secret of life'
Wellcome Library digitizing a large part of their collection of manuscripts including Crick's papers.
web 
10 days ago
Catherine O'Flynn: brutal truths | Books | The Guardian
"Birmingham does have this complicated relationship with its past, where it's always trying to burn photos of itself," she says. "It destroyed all its Victorian heritage and now it's destroying its 60s heritage, without much sense of that being history repeating itself." - Lack of continuity in the buildings leads to 'thin spaces' (David Kolb) as well.
blogfodder 
10 days ago
Presentation Zen: A long time ago, before death by PowerPoint
"If you have a large screen, use it to show visuals, not lines of text that remind you what to say. You do not have to use a screen, but if you do, use it to display visual information that illustrates or amplifies your message in the clearest way possible. Stand with your visuals, becoming a clear part of the visual experience from your audience's point of view."
blogfodder  web 
10 days ago
Oral-History:Mitchell Kapor - GHN: IEEE Global History Network
"It empowered a whole class of people in business who were nontechnical professional people. It gave them a productivity tool for this extraordinarily wide range of uses, anything involving calculations with numbers--not just financial ones." Spreadsheet history.
blogfodder 
10 days ago
College undergrads study ineffectively on computers, study finds: Students transfer bad study habits from paper to screen
"Learning occurs best when important information is selected from less important ideas, when selected information is organized graphically, when associations are built among ideas and when understanding is regulated through self-testing" - anyone surprised? Via Jerz' Literacy Weblog
learning  web 
11 days ago
Creating linear panoramas with Hugin
How to record long façades with little space in front. Parallel panoramas.
web 
14 days ago
Is the web really dead? - Boing Boing
Percentage vs absolute vertical axes joke. Via daringfireball
blogfodder  maths 
15 days ago
The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine
Wired magazine about the change in the way we view and send our packets...
blogfidder  maths 
15 days ago
Hugin Tutorials
Hugin image stitching package: you can stitch photos together or correct the perspective within a photo.
web 
16 days ago
"Hallowed Ground" | History Eraser Button
Photos near 'ground zero' in New York. Via daringfireball
blogfodder 
16 days ago
BBC News - Cult of less: Living out of a hard drive
"The DJ has now substituted his bed for friends' couches, paper bills for online banking, and a record collection containing nearly 2,000 albums for an external hard drive with DJ software and nearly 13,000 MP3s." - Bit of a free ride issue here I think... however data recovery and cloud based backup look like good investments!
blogfodder 
17 days ago
The essential beatfinger: Converting LaTeX to HTML, etc. with TeX4ht
Tex4ht can convert LaTeX documents into HTML 4.0+ with various options, this blog post shares some useful information on how to install on an older version of ubuntu
linux 
17 days ago
Photographer Dmitri Kasterine's best shot | Art and design | The Guardian
"He never gave me any particular instructions; he once told me that he asked me to work for him because I "stood in the right place"."
blogfodder 
18 days ago
Building home linux render cluster
this is nuts... but fun looking.
linux 
27 days ago
GEEKS BEARING GIFTS - Chapter Summaries
Dr Theodor Nelson's reverse list being an analytical summary of his most recent book.
Web 
28 days ago
Miracle Device
Review with excerpts of Ted Nelson's Literary Machines
web 
29 days ago
Carnivorous plague mice 'wiping out towns' in US Midwest • The Register
"So we decided to write a computer model to determine if the number of mice being trapped is consistent with driving these plague epizootics." - the mice are killing squirrels by the way.
maths 
29 days ago
Open source: A hardy few do all the work • The Register
"Out of 468,000 changes committed, 65 per cent were made by the top five per cent of developers (165). This again isn't so surprising, since the most prolific are project maintainers. 11 of the top 19 maintainers work for Red Hat, two for Collabora, one for Novell, and one for Intel." - Zipf's law in a fresh context?
web 
4 weeks ago
BBC News - Education 'helps brain compensate for dementia changes'
"A UK and Finnish team found those with more education were as likely to show the signs of dementia in their brains at death as those with less. But they were less likely to have displayed symptoms during their lifetime, the study in Brain said."
learning 
4 weeks ago
After Photography › What is next?
The transition from silver atoms to photons.
web 
4 weeks ago
BBC - Brainsmart - Memory Mini: Remembering Pi
Mnemonic for remembering PI to 8 places:"How I wish I could calculate PI easily today"
maths 
4 weeks ago
Citizensheep » Public consultation or user testing?
"The problem seems to be that perennial one of the Web: lots of people have great ideas for layering technology on top of society, and rush to deliver them. What doesn’t seem to happen is a questioning of the underlying processes; it’s all very well encouraging conversation, but what do you do with it?" A nice analogy: consultation as a form of user testing
blogfodder 
4 weeks ago
Urbanized
"Over half the world's population now lives in an urban area, and 75% will call a city home by 2050."
blogfodder 
4 weeks ago
New Statesman - Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World
"America, the home of having a nice day, is where two-thirds of the world's antidepressants are consumed; it is a country usually found wallowing near the bottom of global happiness indices. Meanwhile its standards of education and health care remain dismal, and inequality, violence and debt are rampant." - I'm with Boris about the olympic volunteers not being irritating.
blogfodder 
4 weeks ago
Academic reference management software for researchers | Mendeley
Available as a standalone desktop application as well as the cloud based account. Need to check this one out as it is brower agnostic unlike Zotero. Installs plug in for OpenOffice and a bookmarklet for whatever browser you use. Doesn't seem to import all the data from e.g. copac though
software  web  learning 
5 weeks ago
SearchCredible
Via Jane's Pick of the Day. You type a search term and then click on a source to use, and many are quality assured. I find the extended mouth metaphor for the graphic mildly odd - but that might be my problem.
Web 
5 weeks ago
Locative Hypertext
Stories about places that you listen to/read in the place. Designed for mobile devices.
web 
5 weeks ago
BBC News - How great artists have fought creative block
Why do they always use a picture of a typewriter to illustrate articles about writing? Bit like using a boneshaker or canal barge to illustrate articles about transport. Just a thought.
blogfodder 
5 weeks ago
Departure, arrival and first impressions | Birmingham Black Oral History Project
Interviews with people who arrived in Birmingham - one audio stream and transcriptions.
learning 
5 weeks ago
PBworks Basic Edition
Free class account. They've thought about child protection and access controls. Needs a looking at.
web 
5 weeks ago
Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings
"Lightroom maps the 101 points in its 0-100 quality scale to only 13 different quality outputs. Setting the Lightroom quality to 70, for example, results in the exact same output as setting it to 76, or anything in between." - oddness
web 
5 weeks ago
Op-Ed Contributor - Mind Over Mass Media - NYTimes.com
"For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by clear benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting." - Steven Pinker about the moral panic over the effect of the Internet on brains. Good reading for e-learning module?
learning  web 
5 weeks ago
InContext » Front End Zen
"To maximize your innovation effectiveness, you have to learn to give up your need to control too tightly. You cannot be absolutely certain of innovative outcomes – you need to learn to live with the chaotic, random process that is creativity."
learning 
5 weeks ago
The Open University: Kitchen Konundrum
Tripped over this by accident. Nice puzzles.
web 
5 weeks ago
Newsweek Is for Sale as Newsweeklies Lose Influence - NYTimes.com
“The newsweeklies, for so long, have tried to be all things to all people, and that’s just not going to cut it in this highly niche, politically polarized, media-stratified environment that we live in today.” - Charles Whittaker. Are we in danger of having a fragmented set of interest groups preaching to the converted? No way for people to get a range of views? The BBC probably does that in the UK.
blogfodder 
5 weeks ago
BBC News - Free schools 'could widen social divide'
"If the neo-liberal reforms increased inequality of achievement as well as social segregation in Sweden, a country with a universal welfare state and a relatively high level of social equality, then other countries could risk an even greater increase in inequality from implementing similar kinds of independent schools." - The joys of cross national studies
blogfodder 
5 weeks ago
Mark Bernstein: Minimum Viable Product
"This is the business-side refactoring of the Agile Programming adage that one should build the simplest thing that could possibly work instead of designing things to work beautifully under all anticipated conditions."
blogfodder 
5 weeks ago
HELP! My Kids Are Addicted To My iPad
"Again, a month after we bought it, the iPad has become so central to our household that we have to hide it." - sounds like we (maths teachers) need to be there.
blogfodder 
5 weeks ago
IT council chiefs ditch Sadville after splurging £36k • The Register
"The council’s IT staff “rented” an island and built a virtual town hall in the hope of encouraging Tameside locals to access the authority’s services via Sadville." - User testing? Even with just 3 or 4 Tamesiders? Questionnaire in the libraries?
web 
6 weeks ago
Collaborative writing software online with Writeboard. Write, share, revise, compare.
37 Signals web based application for collectively editing text with other people. Might have potential for e-learning activities.
Web 
6 weeks ago
BBC News - White working class pupils left behind
"Her study isolated those children whose parents who had listed "White British" for their ethnic group, and who were on free school meals - the best indicator of social class they could find"
learning 
6 weeks ago
BBC News - Using computers to teach children with no teachers
The hole in the wall project, and a new acronym, SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments) - via Marcius
learning 
6 weeks ago
Computer History Museum | MacPaint and QuickDraw source code
"When the Lisa team was pushing to finalize their software in 1982, project managers started requiring programmers to submit weekly forms reporting on the number of lines of code they had written. Bill Atkinson thought that was silly. For the week in which he had rewritten QuickDraw’s region calculation routines to be six times faster and 2000 lines shorter, he put "-2000" on the form. After a few more weeks the managers stopped asking him to fill out the form, and he gladly complied." - via the daringfireball
blogfodder 
6 weeks ago
Web Usability Patterns
pattern language day. This one is for designing dynamic web sites.
web 
6 weeks ago
Design Problem - why is it important to teach geometry?
A Montessori answer, based on a pattern language!
learning 
6 weeks ago
YouTube - Reality distortion field remains strong with Steve Jobs after antennagate
Why can't we have news like this here? Can you imagine what these people could do with the Coalition? Milliband? Ed Balls? - via daringfireball
web 
6 weeks ago
Roy Peter Clark's Twenty Writing Tools
ok, succinct
blogfodder 
6 weeks ago
OOoMacros
Some nice looking maths stuff here for OpenOffice.org calc. Includes box plot and histogram, a Gantt chart generator and a graph plotter.
linux 
6 weeks ago
A Personal Electronic Notebook, by Thomas Erickson
"is article describes the design and use of a personal electronic notebook. The findings provide a useful data point for those interested in the issue of how to design highly customizable systems for managing personal information. After a description of the notebook's interface and the usage practices that have co-evolved with the interface, I discuss some of the features which have made the notebook useful over the long term, and trends in the evolution of its design."
blogfodder 
6 weeks ago
What’s Really Going on Behind Murdoch’s Paywall?
"My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself—who have free access to the site—are not going beyond the registration page. It’s an empty world. " Michael Wolff. I'd pay a day's subscription for a look at the server logs...
blogfodder 
6 weeks ago
Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: What I Do
"I like writing in simple environments that don’t do anything except remember what words I’ve thought up. It helps me resist the temptation to tinker with formatting."
blogfodder 
6 weeks ago
Text files and productivity
Cory Doctorow's notes from a talk by Danny O'Brien. I'm using dropbox at present but want some kind of version control thingy running on a web server just for one file.
linux 
6 weeks ago
Dropbox ~ CrunchBang Linux Wiki
This worked exactly like it said on the tin using #!statler alpha 1. I'll be upgrading to alpha 2 tomorrow sometime and so will need to check it still works then. +1 To corenomial, ace linux distribution for web books.
linux 
6 weeks ago
Top Ten Useful Grammar and Punctuation Points I Learned as a Techwriter and in Life in General (and Three to Ignore)
Nice. I like the diagrams.
blogfodder 
7 weeks ago
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