I blipped a while back that my daughter has a Bose mini Soundlink. At the weekend I git the bigger brother to this, the soundlink 2. I haven’t had a proper speaker since I went all iTunes and end up playing music through a compute or ipad. I tend to listen to music while running mainly, but since having this I’m enjoying listening to whole albums again.
Monthly Archives: April 2014
Elegantly destroy
I like the form water takes as it slides over a small waterfall, almost like one thick slab. The title is from the Ralph Waldo Emerson poem “Water”, I always liked the phrase “elegantly destroy”
Adapted bird table
This old mooring post (is there a specific term for this?) on the old Glamorgan canal is now used as a bird table to place crumbs by walkers.
Mapping OER impact
So today we had one of our ‘sprints’ on the [url=http://oerresearchhub.org/]OER Research Hub[/url]. We have developed a cool[url=http://oermap.org/] impact map [/url]for plotting evidence from OER Research against our 11 hypotheses. [url=http://mashe.hawksey.info/]Martin Hawksey[/url] did the development and it has lots of nice features, including [url=http://oermap.org/evidence-flow/]Sankey diagrams[/url] and[url=http://oermap.org/geo-map-view/] heat maps[/url] and [url=http://chaos.open.ac.uk/hypothesis/578/hypothesis-a-performance/]summary pages[/url]. This week we are trying to aggregate all the evidence we can find from other work onto the map. There is surprisingly little actual research about OERS. Lots of projects saying that they have released them, lots of beliefs about how they have the potential to change things, but not much hard evidence of them doing things like improving performance.
Charge!
Pip sprinting towards me, framed through a fallen tree. I think she could Usain Bolt a good work out, particularly if she was chasing sausage or cheese.
You got to have Brains
Advert for Brains brewery in Cardiff central
Horse & rider
My daughter is ready to ride tonight – with the clocks going forward it meant it is light on a Friday night when we go up, so they get to go out on the mountain.
Brand new used car
So we sold the VW van (sniff) and have bought a second hand Vauxhall estate. I don’t really care about cars much, I just want something reliable and that I can drive to Milton Keynes and back regularly, and this seems like a nice car. I appreciate it’s not, you know, sexy. Our neighbour did come out as we pulled up in it, which reminded me of the Springsteen lyric: “Now the neighbors come from near and far
As we pull up in our brand new used car”
Rosettes and reward
My daughter occasionally does horse shows, and they give rosettes out for everything: being there, best turned out, whatever position you finish, etc. So having a rosette is largely meaningless, and I guess this could be seen as that American thing of giving reward for everything, and the ‘self esteem culture’. I heard about a book the other day called [url=http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wrong-People-Have-Self-Esteem-Inappropriate/dp/1599902400/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396425593&sr=8-1&keywords=all+the+wrong+people+have+self+esteem]”All the wrong people have self-esteem”[/url], which made me smile. But, hey, who doesn’t want a colourful rosette?
Inside the hide
There is a bird hide amongst some protected wetland area near me. I’ve never ventured in before, scared of being beaten up by angry twitchers. Thought I’d try it today on my evening run, so only had my iPhone with me (I can imagine the tutting that would have caused amongst the twitcher community). Luckily it was empty. Be a nice spot to sit with a cup of tea and look out.
