Blog post to accompany my submission Organizing and classifying information appeals to me. I appreciate a good set of WordPress tags. But I’ve never managed to get a system that works. Wikipedia’s “Categories” are used to group or cluster pages on similar subjects together. Categories help the reader to find more information about a topic area. Categories …
Category archives: Unfiled
Families on Wikidata
Kate (Q1252986310)and Ravi (Q135189340) are good friends with Dr Susan (0000-0001-9554-4948), who is our next-door neighbour here in Richmond (Q61359147). Our lives occasionally intersect at birthday parties or tea. Their two gals also went to Parktown High School for Girls (Q7138735), like my two. None of these identifiers are as memorable as that of Q1001 …
Family Charts & SPARQL Queries
I’ve use the word “Wikidata” repeatedly in blog posts over the last few months. SPARQL is the way in which you can query Wikidata. I’ve found the easiest way to learn how to “Sparkle” is by experimenting. I have deleted the rest of this blog post. Weird technical glitches.
Public Art and Wikidata
Clive van den Berg’s (Q106259021) “eland” welcomed me to Braamfontein when I came up from Pietermaritzburg for a job interview in 2009 with SAIDE (took me a while before I created their Wikipedia page). In the wild, this buck is the second biggest antelope in the world. The Kudu (I’m told is the third largest). …
Knowledge Graph
I like being understood. Like most people, I prefer it when others get me. When I go back to Pietermaritzburg, am with my school and university friends, or when with family, it feels as if I am with people who get me. Know both me and my context. I think that we make sense of …
Discovering Family Charts.
It’s been a month of changes, which have come in many shades. Cara got to visit Katy in Berlin for the July Holidays. Just after her return, Daisy died (24 July 2025). In a few weeks’ time, Simon will be heading over to Dorset to teach at Milton Abbey and the rest of the family (except Amy) …
ALT routes
I put on my learning technologist cycle helmet and went to work for ALT. For three month, I re-entered the minority world’s Information Superhighway (Thanks, Al) / the Networked Society (hey Manny) / the Fourth Industrial Revolution (ja, Klaus) . Whatever metaphor we choose to adopt today, I occupied the role of professional development for …
Anna is 20
I’m ambivalent about working from home. It’s precarious not having a regular salary and unpredictable, especially with no long-term contracts. We are not a trust fund couple. The choices we have made have been possible because of textbook royalties. Unlike many fathers, I’ve also had the privilege of watching my children grow up and being …
Demonstrate ….
Edtech Strategy Development Technologists have made modernity possible, and technology is a creation of modernity (Bray 2003). Education technology may be situated in modernity, but its purposes can differ, since participants are informed by a social context and spatial structures. Some assume that technology shapes and transforms education. To them, progress is linear and keeping …
A lost decade
I read last year (2024) that 5 new universities were being planned. With News 24 declaiming a graduate unemployment rate of 24%, I have wondered whether another handful of new institutions is the best way to spend our country’s limited resources. The StatsSA report in the tale of the two new universities shows that academics …