Inside View

Github for Education

Screengrab from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I'M THINKING ABOUT Using Github Repositories in the academic year ahead. And I wonder if the process has some #icollab potential by connecting educators in four other countries.

Repositories

For me, the process starts at the end (at the point of major assessment) and that means setting up assignment repositories. That means creating a few repositories for different academic modules and seeding them with boilerplate content. My first seeds are README.txt items containing Evernote, Google Drive, Flickr and Dropbox credentials. My most advanced students will get starter source code for a Drupal site.

Project pages

My Github project pages incorporate background materials, documentation, short texts, photo captions and 30-second scripts related to major deliverables. These taskings involve:

• Committing Markdown files directly to the repository.
• Editing the repository wiki
• Creating a group project page using Drupal.

Automated testing

Automated testing  is part of continuous assessment in my academic modules. I use this mechanism to assess whether students have completed deep dives into essential textbooks and to ensure they are listening to professionally produced audio material. I write these unit tests using a suite of different tools and administer some of thes tests through Socrative while in classroom settings.

Time for Irish Suntans

Photo of Cashel's Town Square snapped by @topgold with Lumia 1520

THE CURRENT IRISH SUMMER is shaping up to be one filled with suntans in the departures area of Dublin Airport. It feels historic enough to record as a blog post.

The last summer that offered me the same warm sun-split experience was the summer of 1995, two years before I started blogging. I didn't keep a diary back then but I was active on Compuserve where I was talking to German school teachers who later crossed the Irish Sea for a two week holiday in Ireland. But I have no online record of those memories and I don't think I snapped any shots on film during that summer. But by the summer of 2004, I had digital records of another lovely summer, including glorious warm meadows around Kilkenny when I used Flickr to start archiving a photostream of my life. Ten years ago on Flickr seems like two generations ago.

I've more than 10,000 images on Flickr, nearly 100 videos, and notice nearly 1000 people every day viewing snaps I've uploaded to Flickr throughout the past decade. I continue to pay for Flickr because it has never abused my details, because it facilitates private photo sharing facilities with my creative multimedia students and because its hard cover photo albums are well appreciated by distant relatives. Long may it prosper.

[Post sent by @topgold via mail2blog using O2irl Typepad service.]

New Cans

Side shot snapped by @topgold with Lumia 520.

A SET OF SONY stereo headphones fell off the shelf of my local Tesco and into my shopping basket. So I paid EUR 22 for the MDR-ZX300 the same week that friends told me they got the neodymium magnet cans for $20.

They're more comfortable at 120g than the Beyerdynamics I've been using the past three years. But compared to the Beyerdynamic, the Sony MDR-ZX300 earcups are pants which means the headset works best for people with small ears. And because I work next to a server fan, I've noticed the earcups on the Sony headset do not isolate sound well. This means I can hear ambient noise along with the headset leaking to the outside world.

But I like the way the Sony MDR-ZX300 packs flat in my desk drawer, helping keeping the cord from tangling among the assorted gear I keep in my rabbit hole.