Czeching in on Tech
A meta-post about how this dormant WordPress archive was transformed into a static Astro site by an AI coding agent, at the direction of Dominik Lukeš. Covers the full pipeline from a 56 MB MySQL dump to a deployed Cloudflare Pages site, and explains the llms.txt convention that ships with the new build.
Read more →I've recently been involved with several projects where the question arose how to handle online presence. Everybody always agrees that you need a website and these days somebody always asks what about Facebook. And with a really hip crowd, you also get a question about Twitter or maybe LinkedIn. But the online presence world is…
Read more →What's Google Hangouts Google Hangouts is a great free video service from Google for groups of up to 10 people to have an audio/video chat with each other while sharing their screens, watching videos together, or collaborating on documents. This seems custom-made for the needs of an online classroom since one of the biggest issues…
Read more →Wikipedia just announced that you can download collections of articles in the ePub format. That reminded me that it has had a curation feature called Book Creator for 2 years. I don't think it has been getting as much use as I would expect but now with the ePub export, I think it has the…
Read more →I gave this presentation at the ALT Conference 2012 in Manchester . Presentation Download presentation from Slideshare . Abstract The title of this presentation is a composite of the many responses we receive when we deliver training on accessible documents to teachers as part of the Load2Learn project, an online collection of downloadable…
Read more →Inifinte webinar (Photo credit: RubyJi) I've been using GoToMeeting (GTM) and GoToWebinar (GTW) for three years now, so I thought, it's time to share some experiences. Citrix has been very slow to innovate so I have been looking for alternatives but so far have not found the perfect one to justify…
Read more →Personalizando WordPress 1.5 (Photo credit: juanpol) Note: This is a much longer post than I intended. Therefore, I could not face rereading all of it and fixing it for clarity and grammar. Let me know if something is too opaque. Also, not everything that could be linked is linked. Let your…
Read more →Why text to speech Balabolka I'm taking a MOOC (a Massive Open Online Course) on Coursera . It's a literature course on Fantasy and Science Fiction and I noticed on the forums some people were worried about the amount of reading. I'm pretty busy these days so I decided I'd…
Read more →In case of problems: How to uninstall Office 2013 Preview If you have trouble with the Office 2013 Consumer Preview and cannot uninstall it, you can use this tool from Microsoft [Link downloads file ]. You may have to associate your file extensions with the previous version of your Office application. This is what happened…
Read more →The unlikely protagonist This post may sound like it was written by someone who opposes technological innovation or at least advocates a cautious wait-and-see approach to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have always been an early adopter of both technological and pedagogical innovations. And I make a pest of myself to…
Read more →I talked about some Moodle UX problems on the admin side . These are some student facing UX improvements that would make the world a better place. 1. Better course navigation: No scroll of death There really isn't much more to say. Get rid of the scroll of death. There is simply no instance where…
Read more →Moodle 2 has introduced some useful features that make administration easier. The search admin option, docking, AJAXified search of user lists, permissions setting, etc. But at the same time, it left important things out and/or made others more difficult. Some of these must be through inattention and some through making assumptions about how Moodle is…
Read more →Here are a few reflections on Moodle and Moodle Moot. UPDATE: I've remembered 2 more things I've learned: using SoundCloud to share audio feedback and the proposed Appification of Moodle addons. Find these new lessons at the bottom of the page . A. General Lessons about Moodle 1. Community participation matters I need to be…
Read more →This is my second proposal for a Pecha Kucha session at this year's Moodle Moot . There are five things in Moodle 2 that take up most of our support time. It's been over a year for us and they are still polluting our support system. I realize that I should have engaged on these…
Read more →This is my proposal for a Pecha Kucha session at the MoodleMoot Dublin 2012 . It barely scratches the surface but should be a good start for people who care about accessibility. If you only have time to read one post today, skip this one and nothing read this great post explaining screen readers in…
Read more →Google is about to conduct a usability study on Drupal to add to previous efforts in this area. This prompted me to put down what I see as the biggest usability problems with Drupal. This is based on the most frequent issues I have to provide support for - both end users and office administrators…
Read more →Donald Clark takes the lecture to task ( again ) as being inappropriate as a form of instruction. This time citing as evidence a recent paper published in Science ( available here ). This post started as a comment on his blog but outgrew the comment format. So here it is. It is hard to…
Read more →I visited BETT this week and left both excited and depressed. I was excited because I saw a lot of technologies up close and in the evening took part in Collabor8 4 Change where I got to talk to a lot of like-minded people. But I also left wondering about all the things I didn't…
Read more →We have been using CiviCRM for event management for over a year. This list covers the sort of things that might be needed by an organization running a wide range of events and courses of different types. Event management Easier search : There should be an equivalent of the quick search bar for contacts for…
Read more →I was only able to join the recent CiviCRM book sprint for 2 days but I did spend most of that time working on documenting email in Civi (both CiviMail and core email functionality). As part of that process I discovered a lot of things about email in Civi and hopefully made those features explicit…
Read more →This is a sneak peak at the slides on Slideshare (subject to small changes) of a talk I'll be giving at Moodle Moot UK 2011. I'll be sharing our experiences with using various (mostly cloud-based ) tools to provide Moodle support in a purely e-learning environment with no face-to-face training available. The full text of…
Read more →My proposal for Moodle Moot UK 2011 has been accepted. Here it is in case anyone wants to suggest things. This presentation will share various experiences with providing technology support to Moodle users with varied ICT skills (teachers enrolled on fully online Postgraduate Courses). It will evaluate various approaches that can be used independently or…
Read more →I just gave the following answer to this question from a student. Perhaps somebody can find this useful. Comments welcome: does anyone know the rules about using images from the internet for teaching resources in terms of copyright? I have been copying pictures willy nilly but not sure if that is legal.... Please don't take…
Read more →Here's a quick report on the Mahara UK 2010 conference . I was making Twitter notes, as I went along and I'm not sure, there's much more to add. Here they are in reverse chronological order: Started keeping a list of interesting sites mentioned at #maharauk10 on http://delicious.com/tag/maharauk10. Please add yours. RT @donpresant: Newham College…
Read more →Yes, my beloved Nokia E71 is showing its age and luckily its senescence was accompanied by the expiration of its contract. Enter the HTC Desire (my second HTC phone after the underpowered WiMo 730) and it's been a great first day. And I have the Apps to show it . Seriously, thanks to the great…
Read more →Pictures from the schedule making at THATCamp London 2010 :
Read more →Here's a great example of an experimenting teacher talking about creative use of cheap and available technologies to solve real educational problems:
Read more →Here's a wonderful slideshow on some of the key Web2.0 terms:
Read more →UK MoodleMoot of 2009 was provided lots of insights that will be taken up on this blog in more detail as time goes on. Here are some of the key lessons learned: Moodle 2.0 will be able to use external repositories and share data with online services Moodle 2.0 is expected to be code complete…
Read more →via It’s Not What the Software Does | Smarterware . This cartoon by Hugh MacLeod (that is now my desktop background) captures the divide this blog will try to straddle. It applies to all technology but in particular to learning technology. Software solutions often try to predict every possible thing that a user could do…
Read more →via A Mindset, Not A Skillset on Flickr - Photo Sharing! . What more is there to add?
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