Prompting basics
—————-* Be clear
* Be specific
* Use complete sentences
* Use proper grammar
* Use punctuation correctly
* Politeness may influence results\*
* Don’t be afraid to correct or refine
AI Prompting Matters: Round 3 by Tom Woodward
Tag: Tom Woodward
I want people with serious concerns about edtech but I want people who see potential. I want people who have goals and see technology playing a role in achieving those goals. I avoid people with easy answers and blinding confidence. Give me people who worry at night that they’re wrong. Give me people who help you navigate complexity but don’t hide it. Give me people who can see when it’s technology causing a problem and when technology is just providing evidence of larger societal issues. These things aren’t angst to me but an accurate and honest view of a messed up world and an attempt to navigate a path to something better.
I really enjoyed this reflection Tom on finding balance, as well as keeping on keeping on. This is something that I tried to capture a few years ago in regards to ‘being informed’ in response the Cambridge Analytica revelations.
One thing that I was left thinking about after reading your piece was a recent interview with Kieran Hebden’s creative use of Spotify. Rather than catering for people who do not care or complaining about the way in which the service surfaces some tracks and not others, Hebden’s seems to ‘see the potential’ in using the swath of music available to create an evolving artefact for listeners to explore themselves.
It would seem that there is always a choice.
The lions are dragging people out to eat them and one guy was described as punching the lion in the face as he’s dragged into the darkness. He had to know that punching a lion isn’t going to work out but what else could you do? I’d like to think I would offer what resistance I could- futile or not. Might as well keep punching the lion in the face, maybe bite its ear or something, as I am dragged to my inevitable doom.
Thank you for the food for thought Tom. I really like your point about looking for things that change your mind. I sometimes wonder if I have been in my support position for too long, but I never cease to find new ideas being added to my toolbox that change the way I see things.
I like Timeline JS. It’s a nice way to create multimedia timelines. I’d previously done some work that would take WordPress JSON API data and insert it into the Timeline JS view.1 It was nice for creating alternate and standardized views of blogs that might be useful for different reasons. It didn’t serve some other needs and while doing it through a generic URL was handy for many reasons it was odd in other scenarios. As a result I decided to make a new version as a plugin. If you don’t like reading stuff there’s a quick video of how it works below.
I finally got around to trying Tom Woodward’s plugin to displays posts using Timeline JS. My timeline can be found here. I am also intrigued by the different ways of representing data within WordPress.
This is for a workshop with students on Saturday. It’s a revision of a thing Jeff and I did a way back in 2018. I think I’ve come up with some improved examples and I’ve revised a few things. The goal is to let any skill level start to see how spreadsheets can be useful to them. The videos are…
Tom Woodward provides a range of strategies for digging into data. This is a useful collection, along with Karl W. Broman and Kara H. Wood’s tips for data organisation and Ben Collins’ best practices.
One one end of the spectrum with WordPress multisite might be a site that’s locked down. It has a narrowly defined purpose and very limited themes and plugins. You may find there is only one theme and the plugins are all network activated. Your choice in this space is still greater than what you’d get in Facebook or Twitter but it’s pretty tightly controlled. This can be good for some people and some purposes. It’s consistent. Very little can go wrong because there are so few choices. People are not overwhelmed by choice.
On the other end of the spectrum is what we tried to do with Ram Pages. You have a couple hundred themes and a couple hundred plugins. The goals is to make pretty much anything people wanted to do happen in that space. You can’t install your own themes/plugins but we’ve covered most of the bases and would respond to unmet needs pretty aggressively. If we didn’t find a theme, plugin, or combination that met people’s needs then we’d make one.
This is going to be fairly long and rambling.3 Despite the length, I’m still going to omit huge portions and only tell things from my perspective. I’m also going to focus on the happy stuff. All stories have sad parts but rehashing them here won’t solve any of the issues or make anyone happier. So consider this the Disney version.
Congratulations on the move Tom. Been enjoying your Long Goodbye posts, it is useful in capturing what is possible.
Good luck with the future.
This was inspired by a request from a faculty member teaching a speech class who wanted to see the presenter’s body language and the presentation at the same time. They found the Zoom presenter window to be too small. You can do some stuff with that on Zoom but not quite what I would want to do. You also might run into issues where you want to record your desktop on one of the free software options that doesn’t let you do picture-in-picture.
I thought I could make a nice, simple little page that would show a fairly large video window alongside a Google Presentation. That way your can record a single window and see it all at once or share that window on Zoom. It took about 20 or 30 minutes of work when I woke up way too early this morning but could become fancier with a little additional work.
I believe we’ve developed a pretty solid pattern for making WordPress do what faculty want and making that happen pretty quickly. We have high goals in terms of taking on additional challenging work while also supporting a lot of things and a lot of people so we’ve had to be fairly pragmatic in terms of workflow.
There are three types of development we tend to do. I’ll list them below in terms of escalating complexity/time. I’ll explain what plugins and patterns we use to make this work. I know I’ve hashed through this plenty of times before in individual explanations but felt that putting in together in one place might help people, myself included, see the big picture.
Thank you Tom for sharing your various strategies and workflows. I like the look of the Display Posts and Page List plugins. I am also rethinking my CCS changes. I have always put them in a child theme, however I am thinking that placing them in the customiser or even a seperate plugin would provide more portability if I were to change themes.
Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)Read Weekly Web Harvest for 2019-12-08 by Tom Woodward (bionicteaching.com) “Link In Bio” is a slow knife For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram…
I have long enjoyed Tom Woodward’s weekly harvest, this is kind of what I attempt with my monthly review.
The limit I see with this is that it does not provide an obvious means of referencing the various links in other posts. Although it is possible to use fragmentions to link to a particular part of the text, mentions are listed against the whole text itself. The alternative might be Hypothesis, but then you lose reference to webmentions.
My solution has been to record each link as its own bookmark and then collate these. Therefore, I am able to easily link to a specific URL, while also providing a summary.
I have thought about removing the posts from my URL, but for now I just let it be.
Join Terry Greene as he and his guests get some air time to discuss technology-enabled and open learning practices in Ontario Post-Secondary Education.
Chris, you might also like going back to an interview with Tom prior to Domains17:
Otherwise, completely agree with going back into Tom’s archives. So many great thoughts and ideas scattered in there.
I had a number of emails from people trying to restrict content in various ways. One person wanted to restrict access because they were editing previously published content. Another person wanted more of a traditional membership-style option with the ability to restrict certain content based on user roles. I looked at some of the plugins out there but felt that building something a little less corporate1 would be pretty easy. It’ll likely evolve as I get some people using it but it’s here now if you want to mess with it.
There always something elegant in your simple designs Tom, even more so in your breakdowns.
There once was a group who really liked Google Plus. With the demise of the service, they were unhappy. With this request, I wondered if we might just build a very similar experience in WordPress. I think I ended up getting pretty close.
Tom, this theme looks fantastic. Will need to spin up a site and have a look. What I like is possibility to embed media that may not have worked so well in Google+. I wonder if it would offer a social media platform in a similar fashion to P2.
Let’s say someone wanted people to write down very personal, very sensitive thoughts about privilege, bias etc. They’ve turned down Google Docs as an option because they heard that people can see that. They want this even if you’ve said that writing down secrets at all is not a good idea and that writing them anywhere digital, let alone the Internet, is a very bad idea.
Tom, what is the difference between using your super secret journal posts and the usual private posts?
Origin Story
In a number of scenarios we’ve used plugins to use the first image in the post as the featured image. That’s nice in that if people forget or are unaware of the featured image it’ll happen automatically and that fits in nicely with how various themes use featured images in various…
In the near future, we’ll have built a JSON-based plugin that doesn’t duplicate the content but just shows a live view of the other site’s content. It’ll get rid of 90% of the problems we see recurring.
Your plugin sounds really interesting Tom. Look forward to seeing how that might change the reading space.
The confluence of distraction and rapid change in today’s digital environment can result in confusion and frustration. We’ll focus on limiting distraction and choosing tools and workflows that will help you do more with less effort. The foundation will be a quick overview of digital productivity patterns (pomodoro, GTD, etc.). From there, we’ll move into successful patterns for getting work done in key workplace applications.
Tom Woodward reflects on the skills required for living online. He discusses knowing how you use your time, checking your data, avoiding distractions, optimising workflows and knowing the ‘basics’. It is interesting to think about this alongside Doug Belshaw’s work with digital literacies. It also has me reviewing my ten step program to being a connected educator.
I talked to some VCU people about ePortofolios1. It’s a conversation I’ve had any number of times over the years. I think that experience is leading to a better understanding of what’s going on structurally and the space we have to navigate competing interests. I’m also in a better position to show how certain technologies might help people find a middle way. However, I’m still trying to be honest about the complexities involved in an environment with shrinking resources and expanding expectations. That’s a rough line to sell when vendors have no compunction about pitching simple answers that aren’t exposed until after contracts are signed. For the record, I didn’t start with this peppy intro when I spoke.
Tom Woodward addresses a number of considerations associated with ePortfolios:
- Strategy: trophy case vs. progress/reflective.
- Audience: internal vs. external.
- Ownership: institution vs. student
- Privacy: password protected vs. public searchable
Woodward provides a lot of nuance throughout his discussion and provides a number of examples to support this. It is a worthy addition to the discussion of ways to blog.
If you cut/paste from a Google Doc into the WordPress WYSIWYG editor you get more than I want. Mainly a bunch of inline CSS that sets the font weight (see below). This is a pain because it’s going to take priority in CSS land and undoing it by hand is a hassle.
This looks great Tom. This might resolve some of the junk code brought across from Blogger too? Will have to investigate.
I’ve done a number of introduction to OER conversations over the last few years. I did another recently. Here is my revised attempt at getting at a very broad overview and maybe going a bit farther afield than is typically the case. This particular presentation emphasized OER as addition and that you could use all sorts of pieces as augmentation rather than replacement.