My world on the web
I wanted to share my own edu-bookery. It is important to state that for me, regular blogging and writing separate to a book is an excellent mental work-bench for writing a book, offering me the discipline needed to write habitually and at length. Still, my book writing process is really quite specific and I have fell upon a helpful habit in writing my latest book.
In addition to the reflections from Mary Myatt, Tom Sherrington and Ryan Holiday, they offer a useful insight into the writing process. It is interesting to compare these with the process often taught in schools. So often students get straight into writing without giving time to the initial planning process.
I do a fair bit of public speaking at internal workplace events like parent information evenings, parent dinners, staff briefings, chairing meetings, staff professional learning workshops, presentations to councils and boards, VCE information sessions and community events through our Centre for Lear…
Chris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)This week, using the magic of open web standards, I was able to write an issue post on my own website, automatically syndicate a copy of it to GitHub, and later automatically receive a reply to the copy on GitHub back to my original post as a comment there. This gives my personal website a means of …
Everything that I have read seems to state that this is easy or seemingly obvious. I registered with Bridgy years ago. I then had issues attaching accounts to Bridgy Publish.
I probobly should document this properly. Always thought that it was me, so turned to other plugins, such as IndieWeb and SNAP.
dave (davecormier.com)But the journey of maker into language arts isn’t just a matter of finding time in the day. It makes sense because of narrative. So much of the creative is about coming up with a narrative for what you’re doing. Whether that’s just the name of the thing that has evolved out of your creative process or a whole story about it. The communication. The writing. The collaboration. The reflection. These are key skills that are needed for citizenship. Team that up with some coding and some maker skills and you’ve got a killer combination.
A deck of creative prompts for getting unstuck
Dave Cormier (davecormier.com)‘Digital Practices’ are the things that I do that are born out of the affordances of our digital communications platforms. It is an assemblage of the digital skills i might have mediated through the digital literacy and habits that i have acquired. Or, to put it more simply, it’s ‘being digital’.
Differentiation definitely makes sense, but again the question is HOW to do it in a class of 27 students.
About a year ago I deleted Google Analytics from this website. I no longer know where visitors come from, what they find interesting, or what they click on. This has liberated my thinking and I believe has made my writing a bit better. I always wrote for myself but I would regularly peak at my statistics. Was my viewership going up? What did people read? How did they get there? What search terms were people using? — Who cares?
There are a lot of numbers that ‘social media experts’ will tell you to maximize. But there are few that make any difference.
Music journalist-at-large – blog, reviews & other media.
I remember when I first came upon Sarah Blasko. It was a cover of Crowded House’s Don’t Dream It’s Over for the compilation She Will Have Her Way:
One of the things that struck me was the way that she cut things back to basics. Although her work often includes rich arrangements, this never seems over done. Her latest album is no different.
Although her use of synth bass and programmed beats leads to comparisons with artists like Goldfrapp, it never seems to reach the same dancefloor intensity. This mix often creates a feeling of fragility throughout the album. I was reminded in part of my experience listening to LCD Soundsystem’s album american dreams. The more I listened, the more the choice to hold back on elements made sense. I found that it is one of those albums that never seems settled and subsequently hooks you in because of it.
Read Gregory Alekseenko for a track by track breakdown.
This is not intended to be an exhaustive or comprehensive list. However, these seven broad topics present hundreds of relevant challenges that our students can and should have opportunities to address.
The act of sacrifice, of foregoing one thing in our journey toward another one, one more generous, virtuous and useful, is actually a little piece of the satisfaction of the goal itself.
If it comes easy, it’s not the same.
Has our contemporary embrace of disruption become a problem rather than a solution?
Think of a topic outside of school that you have a deep understanding of. What are the signals that indicate you have a deep knowledge and understanding of that topic?
Take for example my recent deep dive into Global2. I have worked with, written about and presented on WordPress. However the further I went the more I realised that there were so many nuances that I had never considered. This has been taken to a whole new level with my wonderings about the #IndieWeb.
I therefore find Fullan’s reference in A Rich Seam to deep learning being associated with learning goals problematic. Although such goals can guide the learning, i think deep learning is often directed by fuzzy goals.
If you have slavery in any part of your culture, the entire culture is infected by it.
We are looking to partner with outside experts to help us identify how we measure the health of Twitter, keep us accountable to share our progress with the world and establish a way forward for the long-term … We believe that we can identify indicators of conversational health that are even more specific to Twitter and its impact.
Tech platforms, in their majestic equality, allow both rich and poor alike to marshal digital tools to drown out dissenting voices, suppress votes, and spread falsehoods.
Polarization can and does occur according to class, gender and gender identity, geography, nationality…but when and where it occurs, it tends to be in service of the powerful and the status quo, not as some “natural” occurrence, but as result of dedicated efforts to create it.
It is a means of engagement and attention.
Polarization keys engagement, and engagement/attention are the what keep us on platforms.
In many respects, social media and silicon valley promotes polarisation for its own good.
Digital technology in general, and platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter specifically, exist to promote polarization and maintain the existing concentration of power.
The segregated ground of Silicon Valley is both the literal and figurative foundation for the platforms we use, and the design of these platforms, well-aligned with their racist history, promotes notions of free speech and community that are designed to protect the folks in society who already benefit from the most protections.
This is best understood by considering who is protected by these spaces.
Protected category + Protected category = Protected category
Protected category + Unprotected category = Unprotected
This is often a reflection on the inequality within these organisations.
If we had social media and rules for operating on platforms made by black women instead of bros, what might these platforms look like? What would the rules be for free speech and who gets protected? How would we experience online “community” differently than we do now? Would polarization be a bug instead of a feature?