Return to Calais⤴

from @ lenabellina

Is it the same, being back?

Is there a sense of gain, or lack?

Comfort from being here

Last time round? 

Or loss of the novel

Of new sights and sounds?

Something of both 

It seems to me

With familiar comes comfort

But also I see

How comfort can lead 

To complacency

And from that

I pray

I will always stay free.

For I cannot accept this

I will not accept this

I must not accept this

And so

I listen 

And look

And write in my book 

Of the sights

And the sounds

That are here all around 

If we don’t look away

Or ignore what they say. 

But speak up for those with no voice.

Because we are the ones who have choice. 

Eagles and Doves⤴

from

Today’s Daily Create asks us to

Look out of your actual window and then open a nature webcam from somewhere in the world. (here is the home of nature webcams via the US National Park Service) Write a poem that bridges these two views, exploring the connection between your local environment and a distant ecosystem.

I chose the Bald Eagle cam at Sauces Canyon Nest.

Sauces Canyon Bald Eagle Nest

“Sauces Canyon Bald Eagle Nest” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

And contrasted it with a recent view of the birdfeeder in our garden

276 Collared Doves

“276 Collared Doves” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Small birds visit our garden,
Robins, tits and doves,
Dropping in for a daily feed,
Safe from the bald eagles resting in their nest across the globe

Ducks and Fuchsias⤴

from

I don’t believe in God, the afterlife, or supernatural forces. I do believe in coincidence, in seeing patterns in nature and finding meaning when you look for it.

Mum loved ducks – there are ducks throughout her house. Pictures of ducks, plastic ducks, wooden ducks. Every time I see a duck I think of mum.

Mum died on Thursday morning. On Friday afternoon, on the way back from saying goodbye, we stopped as usual at Tebay Service Station, bought coffee and cake and sat in the café to admire the view. As we sat and looked over the pond I thought of mum with more than one tear in my eye.

Ducks at Tebay

“Ducks at Tebay” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine  shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license.

Back at home on Saturday I shuffled the pages of my daily calendar to find the page for the day – and stopped with a smile. What a lovely picture for my weekend.

Ducks on a Riverbank

“Ducks on a Riverbank” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

And then yesterday morning, as I was pottering around the garden I noticed that we had a fuchsia in bloom – a present from mum soon after we moved into this house 12 years ago, and the first time I’ve seen it flower.

288 Fuchsia

“288 Fuchsia” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine  shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Lovely reminders of a mother who loved me, and who I loved.

Ode to Father Time⤴

from

Today’s Daily Create is to write an ode to Father Time

O silent keeper of all things,
You move unseen through shadows cast,
With footsteps soft, yet never still.
The stars align, the tides obey,
All yield to you—relentless, vast.

Your hands are weathered, old as stone,
Yet you are ageless, ever new.
You mend, you break, you heal, you mar,
A sculptor’s chisel, carving through,
Unveiling lives in cycles far.

A child’s first cry, an elder’s sigh,
The bloom of youth, the winter’s breath—
You’re there, a witness to our change,
A fleeting gift, a final debt,
Each heartbeat passing in your range.

Unseen you turn the seasons’ wheel,
And all our clocks are but your play.
What power lies in your domain,
For all we are, and all we’ll be,
Is woven in your endless skein.

And though we chase, and though we flee,
There is no place to hide, to wait,
For when you call, we go as one—
Forever caught within your fate,
Eternal father of the sun.

Written by ChatGPT

Mum⤴

from

“Take something to remind you of her”, they suggest.
“I already have”, I say.
In the cookbooks you gave me, the marks of my cooking throughout their pages,
In the jugs and vases dotted around the house, the result of many years happy scavenging together,
In the poetry books on my shelves, purloined from yours over the years,
In the pictures on my walls, presents from you to remind me of home.
I don’t need objects to remind me of you.
But everywhere I look I can see your love.

Ode to Mother Earth⤴

from

Today’s Daily Create is to write an ode to Mother Earth.

Oh gentle Earth, beneath our feet,
Your patient pulse, your rhythmic beat,
In verdant fields and oceans wide,
You cradle all in arms so wide.

From mountain peak to forest deep,
Your mysteries you guard and keep.
In every leaf, in every stone,
Your quiet grace, your ancient throne.

The rivers sing, the wind replies,
A symphony beneath the skies.
You gift us soil, the air, the seas,
The fruits we pluck, the shade of trees.

Yet how we bruise and how we mar,
The bounty that you’ve placed afar.
Still, with each dawn, you rise anew,
Forgiving all we fail to do.

So let us pause, with reverent heart,
And pledge anew, a kinder start.
For you, dear Earth, our lives sustain,
In sun and storm, in joy and pain.

With help from ChatGPT

What’s in a name?⤴

from @ lenabellina

Have you changed your name yet, darling? 

In the way you said you would 

In the same breath that you told me 

How you never really could 

Understand why we had fallen 

On that flower name for you 

Saying that it did not fit well

Like a poorly chosen shoe. 

Chains of love bind us together

Like the ones you used to make

From the tiny sunshine blossoms

With the care you always take.

Those are chains which can’t be broken

Even when the sun has gone 

Binding us across the distance

When you’re far away from home. 

Michaelmas is then upon us  

Purple hues at every turn

Thoughts of you brought to us daily  

As we look across the burn.

So we now must ask you, Daisy

To give us your answer, do

And to tell us whether you love 

Daisy

Just like we love you. 

Surely you can see now why

Your name and you are rightly one.

Daisy, flower girl, 

Whose beauty 

Shines out like the brightest sun. 

#CanvasCon24 Barcelona #canvascon⤴

from @ ...........Experimental Blog


It was kind of the great folks at Instructure Canvas to invite me over to a very sunny Barcelona for their annual European conference and to enjoy their impeccable hospitality. I write this up with a certain sense of longing, as I have now left the College and won't be rolling out some of the great new developments. However, I will keep doing my bit to champion many of the themes and ideas that were discussed in the sessions.

I will also feed this back to my former colleagues at City of Glasgow College.  As ever with a large event, I could not be in all of the sessions, so apologies if I missed some other key nuggets.  The space themed conference hotel and venue very fitting for some really useful future gazing, though many of the issues are old and apparently intractable.

Me holding hand of astronaut and pretending to Moon Walk
Moon Walk 
 Here is my quick review.  Excellent keynotes, well organised and chaired by Dan Hill, MD EMEA.  Preconference, I enjoyed getting my brain being picked on what Colleges need next from their VLE platforms. 

Anne Marie Imafidon was a super opening speaker,  her work with Women into STEM is superb and it was great to hear her speak about the need to educate for the future and not for now. How important too that we inspire the next generation - gravitas is one of my pet hates - that as a young bright black girl she could only see images of serious looking dead white men with beards who had apparently invented the future - could have been a block to her own aspirations.  She is truly a great role model. 

This fitted well with later speaker Jóhanna Birna Bjartmarsdóttir (johannabirnabjartmars.com) a now confident, high achieving, young women who was initially rejected by the education system. A truly humbling story.  Interesting how much AI and other tools like Speechify and Grammarly enabled Johanna to re-engage with learning. 

 Ishan Kolhatkar from Inspera challenged us around the future of assessment. Exams will still be a thing, but in increasingly in smaller and more personalised bursts, and an old acquaintance and well known leader of digital learning Martin Bean - chaired some excellent panel sessions over the day. 

More on that later but hoping to see him in Scotland in December.  

Main messages here is that Generative AI means the end of lots of things and beginning of lots of new things particularly for learners and learning.  In twenty years time learners will scoff at old means of delivery of learning , just as they will be puzzled by computer keyboards and or even that in olden times people touched screens - voice and face recognition is future.

Here are my takeaways 

  1. What seemed to be fairly standard "what is AI session"  from AWS services suddenly became quite exciting when presenter demoed PartyRock. Worth a look.
  2. Mary McCooey of Queens University - has created a Canvas course for academics to make the most of data available to them to them at course level. Many teachers don't know how and don't access all the data they already have access to.  They have also pushed on with Canvas Data2. The analytics has enabled useful learning that has impacted on practice.  It seems counter intuitive but learners like doing as much as possible on the small screen on their phone. Has done a lot to link range of data and reports on usage of LTIs etc.  Also on when and what learners access and that they prefer interactive content. As COGC about to do some more work here would be useful follow up, there is also scope to work with Corry at Glasgow School of Art on Canvas data 2 in navigating this as she has very small team and would benefit from nearby critical friend. 
  3. Cidilabs  this platform blew me away perhaps worth having a look at but do that alongside the new page creation designer from Canvas . The UDoIT tool might be more useful than blackboard ally as more Canvas native . They even have a tool that takes a PDF and converts it into a Canvas page. City of Glasgow College does have a few courses where there are squinty old PDF images of text that would benefit from this converter. 
  4. Similarly worth having a look at Feedback Fruits some of their work around collaborative assessment particularly interesting and offers possibility of much more authentic assessment of group work and contributions of learners to team based assessments.
  5. From AI sessions - we have all policy etc in place at COGC what is needed next is a more technical road map around adoption across College operations. I think most institutions need that. 
  6. I met with Rosie Loyd of Tutello a platform that turns lecture notes and more into AI enabled agents - which looks just what many centres now need. 
  7. Ryan Lufkin ran a great session I will certainly start following his podcast  I wonder if COGC would be interested him as speaker for future Learning and Teaching Conference ? His vision around impactful eight is good and aligned to global change The Impactful Eight - Instructure Community - 599792 (canvaslms.com)
  8. Most Colleges in Northern Ireland and Sweden all use Canvas opening up more opportunities for national cooperation around Canvas Commons.
  9. Swedish institutional lead interested in how UHI manages online and blended learning will make relevant introductions to colleagues at UHI.
  10. Met EDF a development organisation who supported and continue to support Oxford Universities Canvas journey. I still think its amazing that we give Glasgow College students the platform used by most of the top global universities. EDF useful to know about if you need Canvas support.
  11. Encountered, a new to me, similarity detection engine and I will have a poke around and promote if it is as good as it looks.  Shame they have just missed the APUC framework window.
  12. Portflow by Driem - another portfolio solution not sure I need a deeper look .. but if you already have Canvas folio ? 
  13. Manchester University are where we were five years ago but giving themselves a very generous two year window to move across to Canvas.
  14. Had a useful conversation with Wiris  block in past to adoption is that they were always looking for an institutional licence which was just prohibitively expensive - suggests they may now be able to do smaller departmental deals.  If contact comes back will pass on to college. 
  15. Finally great overview of Canvas Product Road Map My favourites are the new block editor and ability to have differentiated content release along with in course smart search, the new AI discussion summary tool and for the teckie in me the new LTI management tools.

I hope this summary is useful I am now back in very cold Scotland.  Thanks again Instructure for a really useful conference. Thanks too to all the great folks I met at conference for making it rewarding and fun.  









On death⤴

from

She slips away gradually
Retreating from the trivia of everyday life
The daily paper resting, unread, upon her lap –
Sometimes she notices and is surprised to find it still unopened –
No more Suduko, no more politics
(This latter is a relief to her left-wing children!)
Her mind folds in: a moth without a flame
As her body tells her it is time to leave.