Today is St Andrew’s Day, Scottish feast day of Andrew the Apostle. no day off for me, as although it’s a Bank Holiday, institutions are not obliged to honour it (boo!).
Fareweel to a’ our Scottish fame, Fareweel our ancient glory; Fareweel ev’n to the Scottish name, Sae fam’d in martial story. Now Sark rins over Solway sands, An’ Tweed rins to the ocean, To mark where England’s province stands- Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
What force or guile could not subdue, Thro’ many warlike ages, Is wrought now by a coward few, For hireling traitor’s wages. The English stell we could disdain, Secure in valour’s station; But English gold has been our bane- Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
O would, or I had seen the day That Treason thus could sell us, My auld grey head had lien in clay, Wi’ Bruce and loyal Wallace! But pith and power, till my last hour, I’ll mak this declaration; We’re bought and sold for English gold- Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
Grab the 5 nearest books around you. (Novels or textbooks, whatever story you’re wanting to make.)
Create a story from the following:
The first sentence on p. 1 of the first book. The seventh sentence on p. 5 of the second book. The first sentence of the third paragraph on p. 20 of the third book. The fifteenth sentence on p. 47 of the fourth book. The last sentence on the last page of the fifth book.
Last week Wendy and I gave a presentation about the collaborative poem written for a DS106 Daily Create and some of the remixes that came from it. Here’s the recording and a link to the slides.
Sometimes I see a Daily Create that makes me wish I had a lot of time to spend on it. Friday was one of those days. The prompt was to make a Bob Ross style voice over.
I only had a few minutes, so I grabbed a pic of Godzilla from Flickr and ran it through a few filters in LunaPic. My big find was a Bob Ross soundboard with lots of very short clips of his voice. I’d recently noticed that Windows 10 has an inbuilt video editor, so I thought I’d try it out. Luckily it was very easy to use – I just dragged and dropped the images in and played some of Ross’s sayings till I found some that fitted. A quick save and upload to YouTube and I was done.
I wish I’d had more time to line up the audio better, but I am quite pleased with my quick Create
Many years ago mum made me a blanket for my bed. It’s made from woollen garments left at the end of a jumble sale, all in my favourite pinks. I put it on my bed when we first got the cats, and Lacey sees it as her own. Recently I noticed that it had been eaten by moths, so I brought it downstairs and put it on my yarn chest, intending to mend it. Of course, it is now Lacey’s new bed, as you can see. So now I am stuck with darning the matching cushion (actually, this is one of Cagney’s beds, so I’d better be quick before she misses it!
As I was searching for ideas for mending this and celebrating the wear and tear, rather than hiding it, I came across Sashiko, which is exactly the ethos I was looking for as it’s a way of celebrating the remix.
Now if only Lacey will let me darn her new cat bed …
A week away on Mull, one of my favourite places in the world. We had a beautiful lodge – big, top quality, nestling in the middle of nowhere. The neighbours were …
Not all that friendly – tolerating us, at most.
Some of them were fairly shy, only letting us look at them from a distance, through a window.
But the weather was kind to us, and the views were stunning.
While we were there we stopped at the abandoned boats, as we always do.
And took a drive over to Fionnphort, to find sunbathers.
Do you tidy up at the end of a beach party? Are you happy to walk away from the embers of a beach barbeque, ignoring the empty drink cans and food wrappers, or do you carefully collect any rubbish that is there and leave the beach as clean, or cleaner, as it was when you arrived? if you hosted a party in a public place and left before the end would you return once it was all over to take down the gazebo and put away the deck chairs?
Of course you would – or you’d ensure that someone else was doing it.
If you saw others having a party, would you barge in and start talking loudly, ignoring everyone else there? Would you leave your rowdy toddler to stampede through others’ conversations, denying any responsibility for him when others gently mention it?
Of course you wouldn’t.
Two things have got me thinking about this. The first is the tragedy of the commons that is happening in the Scottish Highlands, where hordes of thoughtless tourists are defiling the beautiful beaches with litter, and worse. This makes me cry – the Highlands are beautiful, and fragile. They deserve our respect, our love, our care. Some humans suck.
The second is the tweeting of Twitter bots to some hashtags I use. One of these is a cautionary tale for educators. Some time ago, I am told, a class activity for a course was for each student to create a bot. One such bot still tweets, regularly, to the course hashtag. The creator is long gone, nobody takes responsibility for closing it down. When a friend commented that it was wrecking the tag feed, I realised I’d blocked it. There should be a mechanism for removing this digital clutter.
Soon after this conversation, I noticed another bot had tweeted to #CLMOOC. I’d not have thought much about it, but the other bot was on my mind, so I quote tweeted it. The bot owner replied from her personal account: dismissive of our point of view, arrogant, lacking in empathy. Creating the bot had been fun for her. She did not care what others thought – her five minutes of fun trumped everything. (Looking just now I see that it tweets nonsense every hour – random words taken from the owner’s blog. Not funny, or clever – pointless at best.)
Earlier this year I attended the OERxDomains21 conference, where one of the main platforms was Discord – a multi-channelled happening that had been well designed. It made the conference for me, and as the event ended and we all began to wind down, I appreciated being able to dip back in and see what I’d missed. But what I really appreciated was how the organisers returned some time after the event to tidy the space away and leave no trace of mess.
