minktoast.net

wot i said in july…

tom — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:49:52 +0000

…still seems pretty accurate as stock markets crumble (as does the monbiot quote).

but of course financial market meltdown isn’t anything compared to what it’ll be like as oil supply starts to fall by 7 to 20% per year. hold tight and get those veg in the ground!

heinberg principles

tom — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:45:02 +0000

Bailout blues | Energy Bulletin. Thanks Richard - I feel like that about the news too. Instead of writing something eloquent I drank some beer and put on some very loud drum and bass. Great fun.

Useful Gardening Forums

tom — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:44:35 +0000

Below are links to some UK and Irish forums that are good for getting advice on growing food. Do leave a comment if you know of any more good ones.

Monbiot says what I was trying to say in the pyramid post…

tom — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:16:43 +0000

The issue is that capitalism involves lending money at interest. If you lend at 5%, then one of two things must happen. Either the money supply must increase by 5% or the velocity of circulation must increase by 5%. In either case, if this growth is not met by a concomitant increase in the supply of goods and services, it becomes inflationary and the system collapses. But a perpetual increase in the supply of goods and services will eventually destroy the biosphere. Monbiot.com » Identity Politics in Climate Change Hell

Effectively using a Course Management System

tom — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:47:57 +0000

There are a number of Course Management Systems (CMS) for running courses via a website. These are also sometimes called Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE).

I use Moodle to look after the Organic College’s distance learning courses. This has been fantastic but I often find myself looking around at other services which would be easier for course participants to use to get things done. For example:

Wordpress or Blogger would allow participants to create rich blogs more easily than they can in Moodle
Picasa desktop and Picasa Web Albums would allow easier uploading and displaying of photos
Wikispaces has a much richer and easy to use wiki system where participants could work collaboratively on documents.

There are lots of other examples of where a free web service that has been designed to do one job does that job better than the CMS. In an effort to improve the experience of participants on our courses it’s been challenging to make decisions about using these other services. Stepping out of the ‘walled garden‘ of the CMS means that they will have to learn new systems, create new accounts and potentially get confused as to where they are on the web. The extent to which these things are a problem very much depends on the individual.

Matt Crosslin has an interesting series of articles called ‘Death of the Learning Management System’ over on EduGeek journal that address some of these issues. In part 5 he looks in particular about how to connect users of the CMS with other services. He says:

We need to start seeing the LMS as the control panel of a subway system. As trains go all over the place, the relay information back to the control panel so that the head conductor can know where they are going and what they are picking up on the way. In other words, use the tool to make the instructors job easier while also launching students out on to the web to learn.

This is similar to the approach I’d like to take; Moodle is a fantastic way to look after the course content, but it would be good to make using other web services part of the course experience whilst still connected to the ‘control panel’ - i.e. Moodle in our case. The beauty of using an Open Source CMS is that plugins can be written to adapt functionality. In the above article Matt mentions that he will look at writing some plugins for Moodle to provide more of this kind of functionality. If Susweb gets time that will be something I’ll look at as well.

Dowse with these!

tom — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 06:22:12 +0000

I couldn’t resist posting this picture which I found via Graham on Mark Wallace’s blog.

Some people may find this provocative!

god lowers the price of oil

tom — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:28:18 +0000

these people may be a tiny bit insane.

Picasa desktop upload to Wordpress button

tom — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:58:51 +0000

WordPress Idea — Picasa desktop upload to Wordpress button.

10 reasons why mind mapping is great

tom — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 07:29:56 +0000

10 reasons why mind mapping is great. I use Mind Mapping a lot both for planning, research and summarising. Both hand-drawn and computer-created (currently use iMindMap) are valuable.

Time to Get Growing

tom — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:15:58 +0000

It’s been a long time in gestation but I’m excited to be writing the first post for ‘Get Growing‘ - a site dedicated to growing your own food. The aim is to provide inspiration and information to encourage more of us to start producing and eating things we’ve grown ourselves.

From small acorns…

There are lots of reasons why I wanted to start writing this - reasons that will be covered in future posts - but a particular motivation for starting now is that I’m about to begin a new garden. I’ve grown a few radishes as a kid and had a few lettuces in the back garden over the years, but I’ve never seriously spent time tending a garden and growing a good proportion of my own food.

Why am I starting to garden now? Where is the garden? What will be on this website? All questions to be answered over forthcoming posts.

For now it’s ‘time to get growing’…