A Modern Inconvenience

I should have seen it coming, I should have been prepared, but it still came as a shock when Google Chrome told me my blog had been blacklisted as a potential source of malware.

Initially I didn’t know what to do. Ignore the warning and go to the site, taking the risk that I’d infect my computer? Ignore it in the hope it’d go away? Panic? Cry? Shout for help?

In the end, I did the next best thing to shouting for help – I tweeted.

I've got warnings about malware on my blog, but no idea how to clean it up. Not self hosted, waiting to hear from host. Any thoughts? Pls RT

10/19/2012 5:35 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@drewburrett

Drew Burrett

Amongst the respondees was one of my oldest friends, @alanbboyd. He saw my cry for help and saved the day, stopping me panicking and giving me the advice and assistance I needed.

Solving the problems required the following -

• ensuring all anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-malware & firewall software on my computer was updated
• logging into the WordPress admin for the site, checking for rogue accounts and changing ALL the admin passwords
• installing some site security plug-ins for WordPress -
  • Quttera Scanner - detects hidden iframes and other malicious code
  • Sucuri Scanner - identifies malware, spam and blacklisting
  • Wordfence - verifies and repairs core, theme and plugin files
• performing scans to locate, indentify and repair the majority of the problems
• editing header.php file via WordPress menu Appearance–>Editor to remove ‘hidden’ iframe scripts
• re-running scans to confirm complete removal of malware
• backing-up the entire site
• setting up Google Webmaster Tools on the site and requesting a malware review via Health–>Malware

This whole episode has been a huge learning experience for me, it’s made me tighten things up enormously and gain a lot more knowledge and a few new skills.

I may be in the minority, but I reckon there are a huge number of other bloggers who, whilst confident users of their blogging platform, have little or no technical knowledge and skills. I have rarely, if ever, gotten under the bonnet of my blog, and was consequently highly vulnerable to this kind of hacking.

If your experience of blogging is similar to mine, I’d suggest you install those plug-ins, do some scans and tighten up your security in general.

If you are an expert in getting under the bonnet of your blog and you think I might have missed something, or could do more to protect my site from further inconvenience, please let me know.

Here’s hoping for a trouble-free future for stuckwithphysics.co.uk!

Newton’s Rings

I’ve been trying to show my AH pupils all of the experimental work for Unit 3 during this week, as it’s the last week of the course before their NAB next week.

Having gone over much of the theory before Easter and encouraging them to cover the theory on Scholar, I set up a few of the interference experiments – Young’s Slits with microwaves and using a He-Ne laser, which are both nice and obvious and relatively reliable (for physics demos). We took a few measurements and used them to find the wavelength for the microwaves and the slit separation, d, for the laser experiment.

We also used the travelling microscope to measure the slit separation, using a flexi-cam and projector to show both the view down the scope and the readings on the Vernier scale.

Optimistically, I decided to try the same set up for Thin Wedge Fringes and Newton’s Rings – demos which are not so nice and not so obvious and, as I’ve found in the past, can be awkward to set up. Worse still, they must be observed through a microscope, ideally a travelling microscope to allow measurements of fringe spacing to be taken.

The thin wedge fringes worked pretty well and we measured the fringe spacing, using it to calculate the thickness of the wedge. And it all worked!

Continuing to ride my luck, I had a go at Newton’s Rings, using our ancient, somewhat chipped Griffin apparatus. After setting it up, I had a look through the eyepiece and, to my very great surprise, saw the brightest, clearest Newton’s Rings fringes I have ever seen.

To my further surprise, it all looked great through the flexicam-projector, so much so that I took a picture and tweeted about what I’d been doing. One reply, from John Burk (@Occam98) asked how I’d set it up.

So, here goes…..

The images below show how the flexicam was connected to the travelling microscope, using a collar to align the camera and eyepiece lenses, and in turn connected, via the S-Video input, to a Sony LCD projector.

It’s a very rare physics lesson where all of the experiments work, let alone first time. Luckily, when I needed to get through a lot of experiments to gather up the loose ends of the unit, that’s exactly what happened. After all the effort of getting all the apparatus together and set up, getting such excellent images for Newtons’ Rings was a great way to finish my lesson, and coincidentally the Advanced Higher course.

All downhill to the exam now…..

All Hands to the Pumps

On Wed 29th Feb, with our senior school out on exam leave for their prelims, and a clear desk (not sure how that happened, but it did) I dipped into my twitter stream and saw this tweet from Glen Gilchrist -

I've just blogged: PLNs and peer collaboration http://t.co/8RuTVQXN #mathchat #scichat #ukedchat

02/29/2012 3:24 pm via Glen GilchristReplyRetweetFavorite

@mrgpg

Glen Gilchrist

Glen’s post on PLNs and peer collaboration, details how he and Alexavier Fareheed made the journey from tweets to emails to collaboratively authoring their book, ‘Beyond the Mean‘, using Google Docs in just 10 days.

This post chimed very strongly with an idea I’d discussed in the past with Physics teaching members of my twitter PLN – given dwindling school budgets, and the inherent flaws of static printed texts about fields which are continually developing; why don’t we just write our own ‘virtual’ textbooks?

For about 6 years I’ve been a subscriber to Scotland’s largest and most vibrant subject-based email forum for teachers – The Institute of Physics ‘SPUTNIK’ . The forum has over 600 members from about 900 physics teachers in Scotland, and on a typical day may have 20 or more posts with members sharing links, seeking help, floating ideas and debating the issues of the day. A recurring topic on SPUTNIK has been the new certificate courses coming on stream over the next few years as Curriculum for Excellence progresses, for which details have been released, bit by bit, from our examination board, the SQA.

In conjunction with SPUTNIK, our community is fortunate to have its own dedicated website for storing and sharing resources – SPTR.NET - which was set up and is curated by the mysterious Magic Physics Pixies. The Physics community has made a great deal of use of this, with many benefitting from those generous members making their materials for new CfE units of work and the new Higher Physics course available to everyone.

After reading Glen’s post last week, I posted a short message on SPUTNIK, floating the idea of using a similar approach to producing texts for the new National 4, National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher courses. There were a few positive responses, but nobody seemed to be ‘biting’.

Being a bit busy with prelims and coursework for a few days, I wasn’t able to do anything more with the idea until this week, when I decided to use Google Forms to canvas opinion on the idea a bit further and get a few folk to sign up to contribute.

It’s early days yet, but about 20 people have signed up to contribute in the first few days. Hopefully we can gather enough people to get things organised next term and start writing in the summer holidays.

In an effort to get full coverage and ensure quality, it seemed that the project should break down as follows -

• minimum 3 contributors per unit
• one proof-reader/editor per unit, overseeing contributions
• one proof-reader/editor per course, overseeing all units

In response to Islay ICT – TeachMeet & SLF

In his recent blogpost, Ian Stuart made some criticisms of TeachMeetSLF11. His post lists a number of concerns arising from having been a member of the online audience for the event. Whilst I agree with all of the points made by Ian, I feel I should point out a few things by way of explanation.

The prevalence of Ustream to broadcast TeachMeets of late is down to it allowing an unlimited audience, its ease of use (both for broadcasters and viewers), its high quality video (a massive improvement over flashmeeting) and the fact that it also has chat facilities to allow audience members to make comments/audience during the presentations.

On the night, as I hope who saw it will agree, the quality of the stream was excellent. My poor camera work not withstanding, it was a significantly improvement over flashmeeting, in my opinion. However, due to some technical problem the chat facilities did not work. More frustratingly they could not be made to work without dropping the connection, thereby losing the feed altogether. During the break the feed was restarted to try to resurrect the chat facilities, but again it wouldn’t work.

In order to provide sufficient bandwidth for the broadcast the venue, Glasgow Science Centre, provided me with an ethernet cable connection for machine carrying the Ustream feed. This tied the machine to the auditorium used for the main presentations and made it difficult to provide a link to the round table discussions.

However, an attempt was made to link to the Ustream feed wirelessly using another machine from one of the round tables. Unfortunately there was not sufficient bandwidth to allow the stream to be established.

In hindsight, there could, and should, have been a contingency for this, and an indication on the wiki of which round table would be streamed. With luck, this won’t happen again.

I agree entirely about the choice of speakers, but lately getting speakers at all has been quite difficult. The popularity of TeachMeets is certainly bringing people to the events, but few new speakers put themselves on the list.

I might be speaking for others too, in pointing out that I chose not to put myself on the list of speakers in order to give others the chance to do so. Had there been a return to the ‘pot luck’ method of choosing talks from a long list, I wouldn’t have felt it necessary to step aside. I’d be happy to reinstate this approach.

On the subject of the Ad breaks, I wholeheartedly agree. I understand the need for sponsors at these events, having been involved in organising a couple, but the mentions became intrusive on the night.

As for the 2 minute sales pitch we all sat through, perhaps that is just a symptom of where TeachMeet has lost its way of late.

As Iain Hallahan suggests in his TeachMeet365 blog post there is a growing will to return the stripped down, low key, local roots of TeachMeet. I think that’s almost what I was thinking about with my ideas about TeachMeet Unplugged, but I’m now prepared to go one step further.

I’m thinking about a small event, with about 20 – 30 people, in a free venue, probably a pub, with wifi for a twitter feed, but no web AV feed – it’s a big hassle in my experience. All attendees will be encouraged/expected/compelled to do one or other of the following -

• bring a friend who has never been to a teachmeet
• have a 2 or 7 min talk to give 

All talks would be included in the list, but only 6 x 7 min and 4 x 2 min would be chosen. Recording of audio, video and stills could be achieved using smartphones, flip cameras or other devices and pooled on a posterous site, or using a piratebox on the night.

Watch this space…..

#tmslf11 – Round Table – Glow: Love it/Hate it/Want it

On Wednesday 21st September over 100 education professionals attended TeachMeet SLF 11 at the Glasgow Science Centre. Though not giving a presentation, I did participate by hosting a Round Table discussion on Glow, Scotland’s National Education Intranet.

There has recently been a great deal of discussion about the future for Glow and ICT in general in Scotland’s education sector. Input is being sought from teachers, parents, pupils and representatives of further and higher education and industrial sectors the #EduScotICT discussion.

The premise of the round table discussion I hosted was simple – what did users of Glow love about using Glow, hate about using Glow and would they want to change about Glow for whatever comes in the future?

The discussions round the table gave a great insight into the differing experiences of users in different education sectors, schools and Local Authorities. They also highlighted the very different approaches taken to rolling out, developing and supporting Glow.

Participants were given three different colours of sticky notes and asked to write on each colour what they LOVE about Glow (yellow), HATE about Glow (pink) and WANT for future Glow (green).

This is a summary of the responses -
LOVE IT -

• single login to secure environment with broad range of tools
• access to blogs, wikis, forum tools not accessible elsewhere on internet due to LA internet filtering
• tools allowing collaboration – Glow groups, blogs, wikis, forum, discussions, chat
• facility for pupils to have their own area in Glow – My Glow – which is portable from primary into secondary school
• facility to use Glow blog for pupil ePortfolios
• ability to form Glow groups for classes, departments, interest groups to collaborate and communicate within schools, LAs and nationally
• 
  ability to interact with pupils and colleagues via Glow groups
• facility to store and access documents from anywhere via document stores & Glow Learn
• broad range of National Level glow groups for sector, subject, special events and interest groups 
• resources and externally procured content available on National site

HATE IT -

• login is too complex for many users – not just pupils
• system is too complex for many users, requires lots of time to ‘learn the ropes’when time is a precious commodity for staff
• new users put off by unfriendly and unfamiliar interface – should look/work more like popular tools, e.g. facebook, twitter etc
• confident users frustrated by ‘clunkiness’ of portal – poor functionality, lack of standard facilities available in other tools (e.g. multiple file/folder uploads)
• LA blocking of external content which Glow allows users to embed into groups
• implementation in some schools – early prioritisation of staff and pupil login without there being any content, little or no emphasis on USE
• lack of on-going suport for users – no time, money, staff etc
• search facility very poor – too difficult to find users and content
• no facility to opt out of Glow groups, often created at National level and not targeted to interested groups
• content created by ITE students is lost when leaving training to enter the profession
• potential of Glow Learn is rendered useless by it being so incredibly fiddly to use (three day training should have raised concerns)

WANT IT -

• much easier login procedure – especially for younger pupils
• better support in schools – give mentors/trainers time to support colleagues
• simpler interface incorporating common social media approaches – opt in to interest groups, ‘like’ facility to share content, better targeted news feed
• shared media library of free to air TV content
• ability to create guest accounts locally to include external partners – e.g community groups etc
• make Glow Learn easier to use, and allow easier sharing of resources by users at LA and national level 
• improved set up, provision and portability of user accounts – vital for staff and students moving between schools
• “for everyone in the country to hurry up and get on”

It’s not for me to draw conclusions, or make recommendations here, but there are a few observations worth making about this discussion.
Everyone around the table could see the benefits that using Glow had brought to them and, in many cases, their pupils.
All had devoted a great deal of time and effort into making Glow work for them, their colleagues and pupils.
All agreed that Glow, in whatever form it will take in the future, must be allowed and encouraged to grow and develop, adopting new tools and techniques as they become available and ditching those that don’t work or go unused (has anybody used Glow Messenger?) in order to secure its success.

For this to happen the culture surrounding ICT in the education sector must change. A very common view of ICT in our schools is that it is an ‘extra’, ‘just a tool’ and that pupils will ‘pick up what they need as they go along’. Many at the round table discussion agreed that it the profile of ICT as a vital skill must be raised.

It is my opinion that it should have an equal status with Literacy, Numeracy and Health & Wellbeing within Curriculum for Excellence, as it encompasses so many areas of each. Ensuring that ICT becomes the responsibility of all teachers across all subject areas would drive up the skills and confidence of pupils and staff alike, but this can only be achieved if there are suitable tools, and the time and support available for us all to learn to use them.

WiiMotes for Physics Experiments

I’ve been trying to get to grips with WiiMote Physics in the last week or so. It is a piece of free software which utilises Bluetooth connectivity on your PC to receive data from a Wii gaming controller.

A WiiMote has three accelerometers and an infra red camera inside. Using these it takes 100 measurements from each detector per second.

TeachMeet – unplugged

I’ve been thinking about putting together another TeachMeet in the new term. Part of the thinking has been about trying a stripped back, low (no?) tech version, with the emphasis firmly on sharing ideas not technology. A sort of ‘TeachMeet – unplugged’, if you will.

This is in response to a few concerns I have about TeachMeets, which I think such an approach might address -

• the technology seems to be be taking over a bit, bringing in mainly those teachers who are quite ‘techy’ and, perhaps, turning off those who are not
• TeachMeets can end up ‘preaching to the choir’, the idea (and its undoubted benefits) can only grow if it increases its appeal by bringing in more first time attendees
• organising TeachMeets increasingly involves some level of ‘sponsorship chase’, either organisers chasing funds for venues/catering etc, or sponsors chasing exposure to a captive audience

The difficulty of such an approach, obviously, is how to share the event outside of the venue?

Having run live internet feeds for a few TeachMeets, the level of live interaction with the web audience has been quite low (though that could just be the ones I’ve done). One of the most useful things would be to have some sort of archive of material – slides, links, documents, wikis, etc relating to the presentations.

I figure if some attendees could record presentations, through audio/video/photographs, this material could be aggregated through a posterous site (or similar), as has been tried at other TeachMeets – e.g. TMAyr. Ideally as many people as possible would record this material, though how many people collecting this material would be enough to make it worthwhile?

Any thoughts?

Thinking Differently to Motivate Independent Learning

Inspired by a session at the Physics Summer School, I decided to try a ‘creative thinking’ exercise with my new S6 Advanced Higher pupils.

Giving them the theme of ‘Successful Learners’, I asked them to spend a couple of minutes, individually and in silence, writing down all of the things they thought necessary for learning to be successful.

Having done so, I put them into groups to discuss their individual lists and compile a ‘super list’ for their groups. Each group was then asked to give 3 or 4 items from their ‘super list’.

This was scribbled up on the board and discussed as we went.

As expected, the lists were very similar for each of the groups, but there were some responses given by only one group – ‘time’, ‘confidence’ and ‘classmates’ (hence the underlining).

The aim of this part of the task was to reinforce ‘accepted wisdom’ before turning things around with one of three ‘what if..?’ scenarios for each group.*

• ‘what if there were no books?’
• ‘what if there was no course?’
• ‘what if there was no teacher?’

This time they were asked to come up with strategies for overcoming these apparent difficulties. Again the groups were encouraged to spend some time silently coming up with their own individual ideas before discussing in their groups. Once they had discussed their ideas, we put together another summary.

Again, the responses were discussed as we compiled the list of ‘solutions’ it became obvious that all of the solutions pointed towards aspects of independent learning, none of which were in any way specific to Physics. It was also obvious that even in our true circumstances, where we do have books, a prescribed curriculum and a teacher that these ‘solutions’ would still be of benefit in ensuring they learn successfully.

This got me onto my hidden agenda – making extensive use Glow to achieve many of these goals.

The plan is for my pupils to compile their own ‘textbook’ in the form of a class Glow Wiki; to make use of materials in our Glow Learn resource library; to use the class Glow forum to discuss difficulties, both asking for help and providing assistance to others; using Glow blogs to record their progress through their AH investigations; adding links to ‘good’ web sites to the Glow group and anything else that occurs to me, or them, over the next few months.

I’m also very keen to push SCHOLAR – Heriott Watt University’s VLE – and get as much of their data handling for experimental work performed using simple spreadsheet techniques, rather than laborious manual analytical techniques.

Suffice it to say, my new class seem a little worried at this approach, some admitting they would be out of their comfort zones. But they seemed to recognise the potential benefits to them of gaining these skills and adopting these attitudes. And hopefully they fancy stepping up to the challenge.

If I’m honest, I am a little worried too. I may have bitten off more than I can chew. I may need to spit a bit out. I might also choke.

That said, I’m not short of support, despite being almost the only ‘Glow guy’ in my school, I’ve also got my guardian angel at the LA, and my amazingly helpful and knowledgable PLN on twitter to fall back on.

I will be blogging about this project on a different blog – the class Glow blog.

—————————————————————–

*[On the Physics Summer School Creative Thinking session we were given the example of 'what if a roof tiler lost an arm? how could he still do his job?'

By adding a captive nail and a sticky pad to the back of each tile, he could probably manage to do the job, but such additions make the job significantly easier for uninjured roof tilers. Thus, the solution to the apparently absurd 'what if?' has real benefits for all.]

Physics Summer School – Day 2

Friday morning saw us leave Erskine early for a visit to the Physics Department University of Strathclyde. Here we were shown around the first-year labs, seeing experimental set ups used by students for finding -

• speed of sound in air using tuning forks and resonant air columns
• wave speed for wave on a string, using electric guitar and a device called an iRig hooked into an iPod
• Young’s modulus
• Focal length for a thin lens & refractive index for varying wavelength of light

After coffee we took a tour around some of the research labs, seeing a variety of things that, I must honestly admit, I really struggled to understand.

• One group are using very high power laser pulses in a variety of ways, including to accelerate sub atomic particles, on a scale of tens of metres, rather than the tens of kilometres required at CERN. There are hoped to be many practical spin offs, particularly in the fields of medical physics.
• Another group uses lasers to cool matter to very low temperatures, removing energy from atoms until they reach a temperature in the region of 10 nK (just 10 billionths of a kelvin above absolute zero). At such low temperatures the sample changes to a peculiar state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC). The experiment is set up using CCTV cameras to observe the sample, which produces an image very similar to an interference pattern when the BEC state is achieved.

Unfortunately the presence of a dozen bodies in the confined space of the lab made it very difficult to lower the temperature sufficiently – we were radiating too much heat!

After lunch we left Strathclyde University to visit Whitelee Wind Farm where we were shown the visitor centre and given a tour of the site. Despite having visited Whitelee many times myself, I have never been on the tour, which takes visitors on a short trip around the wind farm in an all-electric bus. The tour was highly informative about the windfarm in all respects, dealing with the design and function of the turbines, their installation and maintenance and the environmental issues surrounding the facility. Despite the conditions we all stepped outside to take a look at one of the turbines up close, before returning to the visitor centre to warm up.

After dinner Stuart Farmer showed us a simple, but brilliantly effective, exercise in handling uncertainties. Involving no more complex a measuring instrument than a ruler, some plastic cups and marbles, this activity gives an excellent insight into the real significance of uncertainties and could easily be used with pupils at all stages. I will certainly be using it with my new AH Physics class when the senior pupils return from study leave.

Physics Summer School – Day 1

For the last few days I’ve been fortunate to have been in Erskine, attending the SSERC/Institute of Physics Physics Summer School – a residential CPD event for physics teachers from all over Scotland.

We started on Wednesday evening with an icebreaker session after registration and dinner. Armed with a small video camera we conducted 30 second interviews on each other at the behest of Bob Kibble.

Thursday morning began with a session from Miles Padgett from the University of Glasgow on ‘Creativity in Science’. Using Edward De Bono’s ‘Thinking Hats’ as the basis for individual thinking and group discussion approaches to planning and problem solving, my  group was charged with the task of ‘re-inventing’ the game of chess. Given a constraint of having chess pieces on both sides being in one colour only, we used the techniques to formulate the idea of a ‘smart’ chess set with pieces able to assist players in a variety if ways. The functionality of such a chess set would, we concluded, be of benefit to players using two coloured sets, potentially helping players to learn to play chess better, leading them to improve their game. Just like roof tiles for one-armed roof-tilers.*

The next session, lead by Gregor Steele, was on using Wii controllers for motion analysis, using free software and the bluetooth connectivity of most PCs in conjunction with the three-axis accelerometers and IR camera position sensing capabilities of the Wiimote. The system proved relatively simple to set up and run and worked well for logging acceleration and displacement for simple harmonic motion and central force and rotational period for circular motion.

Next there was a short Blue Peter style make your own spectroscope activity, using an old CD and plastic box, from MUTR Mindsets. Armed with our spectroscopes, we popped outside to see if we could spot the Fraunhofer absorption lines in the spectrum obtained from sunlight. There were definitely some dark lines present, but after repeated observation, using a number of spectroscopes and some discussions over their nature, we concluded that we were most likely seeing the tracks on the CD itself.

The image on the left is of the spectrum obtained taken using my camera phone. Despite the poor quality of the image, the dark lines shown seem a little too regularly spaced to be Fraunhofer lines.

After this, we went on to have a look at a variety of activities using web cams to detect near infra red radiation. Having successfully butchered a brand new web cam by removing the IR filter, we set about looking at a variety of objects emitting near infrared, but no visible light. The two PCs in the image on the right are showing a heating element in the visible range (left) and in the IR range (right). The element was not glowing at all in the visible, but gave a bright IR signature.

After dinner we were whisked off to Glasgow City centre for a ‘Science Walk’, starting in George Square. Carol Trager – Cowan from Strathclyde University was our guide showing us, and telling the stories of, the statues of James Watt and Thomas Graham, the standards in the square and the Ramshorn Churchyard.