Usually, ceremony to start sports events are ignored, but the historical reference to the "raging bull" during the "commonwealth" (néé British Empire) games caught interest. Hitherto, was unaware that the chains, manacles and other metal tools made in Birmingham, for colonisation, were manufactured by native women themselves subjected to impoverished employment conditions that culminated in a 1910 strike.
With inclusion of countries such as Mozambique (lusophone) and Rwanda (francaphone), perhaps another name change is due; Anglophone Alliance anyone? Then usa could join (at least until Spanish becomes dominant)! :)
Meanwhile the "lionesses" (yes those animals that roam the British Isles) won a football match, 56 years after the last significant win. Most poignant, that females were once banned from play of said sport.
Reply: Sonya McChristie
Of specific interest to read was the failure of 'big blue button'; not a good advertisement for open source software. Did the organisation respond to the failures? Was the open source community helpful and responsive in general?
As for the "challenge" to encourage lecturers to improve accessibility by provision of text captions for multimedia, a simple solution is to pay for the time to do so. For technical subjects, it is a manual process. Sorry.
Reply: Alison M. Hill
Encountered via the aforementioned blog-post, reminded of an earlier post about one's own attempt to make assessment of a gce a class a bit more relevant to extant circumstances. At the time, had looked at the procedures deployed at University Oxford; if students complain (some did) the response ready to reply was that "similar is being done at university, so you had better get used to the idea".
The use of randomised, individual data sets for students was nice to read, as was the use of 'R' as the data generation tool. Again, such innovation will increase time for assessment and thus more money is required (more teachers, surprise!) for equitable assessment of students.
Weather has been too good to be true (thus far), but since "time stops for no [hu]man", the prospect of the new academic year is beginning to "stir" in the mind. This week will be the final to really rest; next, will begin to get some structure, with some review of the new timetable of classes to teach, read some educational research articles and to practice questions to answer. The brain has not exercised during the holiday (rightfully so), but similar to other muscles, now need to slowly-but-surely "warm it up" in preparation.
Will August be another dry month?
The use of 'crouton' has proven to be an excellent way to access gnu/linux on cheap hardware, due to amgaf in a positive perspective for once; distribution of Google products is after all, ubiquitous.
Although it can be cumbersome and inconsistent to use Microsoft, when the extended display option is enabled properly, it is easy and intuitive to drag program windows between computer screen and classroom display monitor (or dreaded "interactive" board screen). Not so with Chromebook Crouton; easy enough in ChromeOS (in fact seemed easier cf. Microsoft: distraction, just found a keyboard shortcut ctrl + F4), but failed in Crouton. Upon further investigation, similar functionality is available via the terminal command 'xrandr', as described in the following 'reddit post'.
That "back to school" time again. Why the difficulty to find simple stationery, in this case a week to view diary and a plain notebook??? In the past, both could easily be purchased for a grand total of £ 2; recent browsing the street stores has resulted in "cheapskate" baulk at typical prices of £ 4, 10, or similar each. Inflation, when the quality remains stagnant.
N.B.: it was not a dry month.
