Continue reading “📚 Why Don’t Students Like School (Daniel Willingham)”
I wrote an extended reflection on Daniel Willingham’s book here.
Look, I too think it would be very exciting if this time it was different. But Gates and so many others have been banging the personalized learning drum for well over a decade, all to underwhelming results. If we are meant to take their predictions for this new personalized learning technology seriously, I think they should seriously account for the underperformance of the old personalized learning technology first.
Source: Bill Gates Tells Oprah About Edtech’s Past, Not Its Future by Dan Meyer
I kind of love Unicode. There are so many stories hidden within all the codepoints, and so much strange complexity.
I want this tool to be somewhere at the intersection of “useful” and “fun.” You might want to just paste a string that’s giving you trouble, but not just that. Hopefully, you will also want to click around, learn, explore. I want information, but I also want stories.
This is meant to be a site for nerds, but specifically not Unicode nerds. (Many sites for Unicode nerds, filled with technical info and jargon already exist!)
Source: About – Text makeup
I stumbled upon Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition on Audible as a part of the ‘Plus’ collection. I was always aware of her work on totalitarianism and the banality of evil, but had never actually read anything. I therefore decided to dive into her discussion of the human condition.
I remember when I was training to be a teacher and I attended the history teacher’s association conference. One of the sessions on offer involved a discussion of VCE history subjects. I thought that it might be useful to attend. However, it quickly became clear that it was intended for discussion and feedback by those who had been teaching the subject for a number of years, not some newbie. In a small room, I sat as quietly as possible and tried to take in what I could. I had a similar experience with Arendt’s The Human Condition.
Wikipedia describes the book as follows:
The Human Condition, first published in 1958, is Hannah Arendt‘s account of how “human activities” should be and have been understood throughout Western history. Arendt is interested in the vita activa (active life) as contrasted with the vita contemplativa (contemplative life) and concerned that the debate over the relative status of the two has blinded us to important insights about the vita activa and the way in which it has changed since ancient times. She distinguishes three sorts of activity (labor, work, and action) and discusses how they have been affected by changes in Western history.
Source: The Human Condition (Arendt book) – Wikipedia)
On the one hand, I understand that, but I am still not sure that it addresses the book. It may well be that it is because the book is one in which different readings prise out different thoughts. For example, quite a few discussions touch upon the rise of the social and the importance that serves.
The characteristic political forms of modernity – the nation-state, the welfare state, and totalitarian regimes – all fail to provide any public space for the achievement of identity. These forms all testify to the modern severance of the political from issues of identity, the modern loss of a basic understanding of the freedom and action that citizenship makes possible. Only participatory democracy – a dimly remembered possibility that makes brief appearances now and then in our era – rekindles a sense of what politics and those who participate in it can do.
Source: Hannah Arendt An Introduction by John McGowan
In the end, I found myself caught by various ideas, such as identity, action, privacy, and knowledge, but never comfortable with the full story. (For what it is worth, I had a similar experience with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan.)
All in all, I probably need to dedicate more time to this book (and possibly Arendt’s work in general), possibly a lifetime. It really leaves me wondering about the importance of prior knowledge and at which point you can truly have a point of view on things. In particular, I really feel that I need to dive deeper into Hegal and Marx.
At their core, all credentials are relational. They represent an attestation from one party to another—a way of saying, “This person did this thing” or “We vouch for this individual.” This relational nature is fundamental to their function, yet it’s often overlooked when people are talking about digital credentials.
Source: Digital%20Credentials%3A%20why%20context%20matters by Doug Belshaw
—
Doug Belshaw on the relational nature of credentials and the place of privacy.
It is understandable that teachers may be using AI in the preparation of materials, and to automate-away administrative tasks under current conditions. But the risks of automated austerity schooling — eroding pedogagic autonomy, garbling information, privacy and data protection threats, enhancing classroom surveillance, and far more — remain significant and underaddressed. Letting AI in unobstructed now will likely lead to layering further automation on to pedagogic and administrative practices, and locking in schools to technological processes that will be hard and costly to undo.
Rather than seeing AI as a public problem that requires deliberation and democratic oversight, it is now being pushed as a magical public-private partnership solution, while both old problems with school structures and the many new problems AI raises in public service provision remain neglected. The DfE’s AI content store project is a first concrete sign of the solutionism that looks set to characterize automated austerity schooling in England under the new government.
Source: Automated%20austerity%20schooling by Ben Williamson
Copy-editing is often invisible labor, thought by many to be grunt-work and not really intellectually demanding. This is unfair to every competent copy editor, but grossly unfair to Lauren, who in her thirty years at Princeton must have made hundreds of books far better than they would have been without her. She did an important job, and she did it better than I have ever done anything.
Source: behind the scenes – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs
—
Alan Jacobs reflects upon the legacy of Lauren Lepow and the invisible labor associated with the roll of the copy editor. Austin Kleon recently reflected on paying ‘attention to the credits’:
If you want to be a better student of any art form, you have to pay attention to the credits! If you love an album, read the liner notes, notice the personnel involved in the recording, and seek out more of their work. (Reading the liner notes is increasingly impossible, as people do so much listening via streaming. Personally, I rely a lot on AllMusic.com or Discogs.) If you like the way a movie looks, watch the credits or check IMDB to find out more about the cinematographer. (Again, increasingly harder — Netflix skips credits by default these days, so you have to scramble for the remote at the end of a movie.) If you like the way a book is designed, check the acknowledgements or copyright page for the designer, the imprint, and the other personnel involved. This is one of the easiest ways to find more of what you like and discover what you don’t know you like yet.
Source: Collective creativity by Austin Kleon
After recently spending time with Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, I was left wondering who edited such a book and what other books they may have edited? I was also left thinking about editing a book like Anti-Oedipus?
formless and incoherent grab bag of titles that come to mind at this moment that, for one reason or another, I have loved over the years. I think I got carried away. I think there are fifty — in no particular order.
Source: Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files – Issue #101 – Would you consider compiling a list of 40 books you love? by Nick Cave
Another list of books to consider when struggling with what to read next.
Given the abuse of comment spammers making it a PITA to manage, many bloggers turn them off, or use some fancy new hip static publisher that does no support comments (aka D’Arcy). Or it happens away from the publishing source, maybe tied back with something like ActivityPub. There the depth of the response is thin, quick, all the intensity of an emoji or some meme gif.
So when I get a genuine, non spam blog comment from a real person, with maybe complete sentences that indicate they actually read what I wrote, not glancing at in during a scroll session, it’s quite a gift.
Source: The Gift of Comments by Alan Levine
—
I agree with you Alan about the gift of a comment on the blog. As Robert T. Schuetz’ once said,
Comments are like the marshmallows in Lucky Charms, the sugary goodness that adds flavor to our day. Comments turn posts into conversations. Sometimes, these conversations turn into friendships, and sometimes these friendships span the globe.
Source: Comments are the Marshmallows by Robert T. Schuetz
I remember in the past at the end of each year I would go through all my comments and collate the bits that stood out. I managed to do this for four years (2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017), but then it fell on the way side I guess. I wonder if one of the challenges is the way in which comments and general conversation have become distributed over the years? Ironically, looking back, it is sad how comments on platforms such as Disqus have been lost to time. Personally, I find something in writing my comments on my own site these days and POSSEing them elsewhere, although it means I do not always get around to commenting as much as I would like.
People often ask me for advice on how to write a newsletter. I usually tell them some variation of what I wrote in Steal Like an Artist: “Write a newsletter you’d like to read.”
I have a few more tips, like “Pick a repeatable format” or “Be consistent at a regular frequency.”
But my current personal motto is: “Newsletters should be letters.”
What I love most about newsletters is the letter part — the epistle, the missive, the bulletin, the dispatch! What’s going on — in the studio, in my life, in my mind — that’s worth sending out? Worth opening? Worth reading?
Source: Newsletters should be letters!
by Austin Kleon
—
I have been wondering about why I fell out of love with the slight obsession I had with my newsletter, I think it was because it may have become a letter to no one in particular. I feel that a ‘letter’ has an ideal reader in mind, maybe?
codi.link is a live editor for HTML, CSS and JS
I have Broken Link Checker plugin installed on one of my sites, but Fido offers a different approach.
There are two important questions confronting any parents with young kids: are you giving them autonomy and have you equipped them with the competence to be truly and safely independent?
Traffic accidents have decreased compared to the years when I played on the road, and street surveillance has proliferated — CCTV cameras are everywhere — so why has our mistrust and anxiety increased along with it? Random but rare kidnapping attempts and knife attacks like the recent one in London don’t help: they feed into a primal fear about the lost child, the child taken by wolves, by witches — and it seems our fears beat back the logic of our own experiences and also the deep, abiding wish that our kids get to have some of the fun of our own childhoods.
A mum being reported to social services for letting her teen travel Europe is a sad sign of today’s risk-averse parenting by Virginia Trioli
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
On that return trip, “I measured the temperature of seeps all over, wherever I could,” he says. The closer to the surface he measured, the warmer the water was. In 2008, a separate team from the University of Minnesota had [predicted](https://conservancy.umn.edu/items/a9ae3228-1d09-4dd9-8bd2-8f63e23e000c) that heat from Minneapolis’s urban surface was conducting itself deep underground, heating the groundwater there like a metropolitan microwave. Brick’s subsequent research proved them right—but also showed that they had significantly underestimated the extent of the warming.
Brick published his results in 2022, as a chapter in [_Threats to Springs in a Changing World_](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781119818625), published by the American Geophysical Union. His findings aren’t unique to Minneapolis. From Japan to Italy, Canada to Switzerland, scientists have found other “subsurface urban heat islands” where pavement and basements warm up what’s below them.
The Strange Heat Island Lurking Beneath Minneapolis by Sarah Scoles
In footage shard by a wedding guest on X, Aphex Twin can be seen performing from a modest DJ booth with nothing more than a small projection screen behind him. Instead of family-friendly sounds and a heartwarming montage of the bride and groom, he opted for drum & bass with eye-popping visuals featuring his iconic distorted face, as seen on the album cover of 1996’s Richard D. James Album.
Watch Footage from Aphex Twin’s Latest Headline Performance – His Friend’s Wedding by Nick Yopko
I remember going to a wedding where the DJ played Nine Inch Nails. This felt odd. I think going to a wedding with Aphex Twin and Luke Vibert is next level. Would be a strange vibe.
‘_Outstanding!’_ you may say, Fletch. ‘_That’s for me!’_ ‘_I’m gonna quit my fucking job!’_ ‘_I’m gonna tell my boss to shove it!’_ But, before you rush into anything, remember that creating art, like many things of value, comes at a cost – and confronting one’s own self can be the most challenging and fearful thing you’ll ever do. Fletch, I wish you luck in whatever you choose to do.
The Red Hand Files – Issue #297 – Are songs from God? by Nick Cave
David Truss (daily-ink.davidtruss.com)I have no idea what song or even what genre will tickle my musical fancy next, but until then, I’ll be choosing between these most recent choices ‘on repeat’.
On Repeat by David Truss
David, I am wondering how these songs end up ‘on repeat’? Clearly, some tracks click, but for that to happen, we need to listen to a wide range of music? Are there times you listen to the radio? Or is there times when your children or wife are playing music that you pick up new tracks from? This is one of those things that intrigues me, especially in the age of algorithms?
I was over-optimistic about the benefits of social media and insufficiently pessimistic about the downsides. However, if it was right for a little while, and now is wrong, the question remains, can it become a bit more right again? If so, how and where? Anyway for a little while there, we made some excellent cat memes.
Things I was Wrong About Pt3 – The democratisation of social media – The Ed Techie by Martin Weller
As I line up with all the other people to say how I too was wrong about the ‘democratisation of social media’, I am left reflecting upon my own experiences. I am particularly intrigued looking back upon Ian Guest’s research into Twitter and professional development.
I am assuming (as I am no longer a ‘resident‘) that Twitter is different to how it was when Ian was doing his research. However, I would also assume that it was different again in say 2010 when Clint was doing his research. We often talk about Twitter or social media as something stable, but surely it is something that is forever changing. That is one of the take-aways I took from Ian’s choice to use actor network theory as his framing.
For me, one of the changes that I noticed was a move from sharing to something else. It leaves so many questions. I wonder where people moved? Did they stop learning or just stop sharing, instead to become lurkers, keeping their ideas in their own gated communities? I feel that it is far too easy to say we were ‘wrong’ or ‘right’, I wonder if the more useful point of reflection is what ideas we might have been ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about and how things have changed and what sort of ‘right’ is required moving forward. Is the ‘right’ needed a online parks? Here I am reminded of something from Angus Hervey about ‘letting go lightly’ to aide in moving forward:
Don’t say “I’m right, and you’re obviously wrong.”
Say “at this point, given all the evidence I’ve considered and having made a genuine effort to try and see if from the other side (point to some examples), the balance of the argument seems to rest on this side for these reasons, so for now that’s what I am going with. If new evidence, or a better argument comes along I am totally willing to change my mind about this, and I’ll also be pleased because it will mean I’ve gained a deeper understanding about the world.”
The Beauty of Being Wrong by Angus Hervey
Continue reading “💬 Things I was Wrong About Pt3 – The democratisation of social media”
This presents a quandary for open scholars – do you continue to advocate for open access for everyone, and at the same time accept that you are feeding the machine? Do you accept AI as inevitable and hope your content in some way adds to its quality (I mean, I’m not sure what my random metaphors on here will do to the learning models). Or do you seek to control content with more specific licences that might prohibit being harvested by AI but allow human access?
The darkish side of open licences by Martin Weller
Martin Weller reflects the fine line between open licensed content and the fear that it is being fed (or mostly likely, has been fed) into the AI machine. I like Weller’s point that, “There is no “CC-BY for uses I like” licence.”