Month: September 2018

Bookmarked Hope Stands Tall (The Women's Game)

In 2017, AFLW rode in on a glorious wave of cultural change that felt unremitting and incapable of being reversed. Finally, women had the opportunity and national stage to play that felt like an acknowledgement of, and beginning of a correction to, over a century of exclusion and marginalisation. But now more than ever it needs champions like Hope to be brave enough to assert themselves in the face of the increasing backlash to the opportunities that wave provided.

Kate O’Halloran breaks down the incident which involved Mo Hope walking off the stage during a panel discussing women’s football. The problem, as O’Halloran explains, relates to control and power of bodies:

It should go without saying that men who participate in Australian rules football (or rugby league, or any other sport for that matter) also put their own bodies at such risk. Those choices, however, are not questioned in the same way women’s are, because men are seen as having autonomy over their bodies and their decisions, while women’s bodies – in the minds of dinosaurs like Malthouse at least – are still subject to men’s control.

For me, I have concern about the expectations placed on AFLW. Like many forms of change and innovation, people often want their cake and to eat it too. It would seem that there is an expectation of parity on the field when I doubt their is parity off the field.

I was watching Talking Footy recently and Brian Taylor spoke about the process that Collingwood are looking at to fix Darcy Moore’s hamstring issues. They are hoping to do biometric testing during the preseason to identify where the stress is coming from. Would an AFLW player who needs to take leave from their full time job receive the same resources dedicated to them?

Liked Tehan threatens to withhold school funding unless deal is struck by Henrietta Cook (The Sydney Morning Herald)

The Morrison government has threatened to withhold billions of dollars of funding earmarked for Australian public and private schools next year if states refuse to sign up to its new education funding deal.

I agree with James Merlino:

“If Mr Tehan were serious about education, he would work with states and territories to provide fair funding for every child rather than come up with solutions that pit one sector against the other.”

This feels like Groundhog Day. I am a little sick of the politics associated with state education. The way this is going I might threaten to vote Labor in the next election 🤷‍♂️

Replied to Bears, Beats and Better Buildings 🐻🎸🏠  – Issue 99 – Dialogic Learning Weekly (mailchi.mp)

This little gem of an article popped up when I was exploring some music learning spaces research. 15 of the world’s most legendary recording studios. The post outlines a range of iconic recording studios across the globe and their contribution to music culture and history. I am always fascinated by creative spaces and in particular the music making process. The mobile recording studio started by the Rolling Stones was used for the live recording of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” – fantastic!

Tom, I really liked the post you linked to about the recording studios. One of the most interesting stories i have read about recording studios involved Rick Ruben recreating the conditions for Johnny Cash to flourish. What stood out was that everyone requires something different. Probably not much of a surprise, just hard sometimes with multiple ‘artists’ in the same space.
Bookmarked Brett Kavanaugh and the Cruelty of Male Bonding by Lili Loofbourow (Slate Magazine)

How does the yearbook help us understand the other allegations against Kavanaugh? Well, for one thing, Kavanaugh’s admitted virginity shows how empty these rumors about Renate were. Whatever stories they circulated about her sexual behavior weren’t actually about her; to them she was less a person than a token you claim to gain status with your bros. That tells us something valuable about how Kavanaugh was willing to treat women when other guys were around. It also offers a clear window into how male networks like Kavanaugh’s work. If you get caught, you deny, and if you can’t, you manufacture explanations that may sound ridiculous to an outside audience. But you never break. His yearbook buddies tried to shelter him because sheltering him sheltered them.

It is interesting to consider the past reborn from the school yearbook. This has me rethinking the work I did with Year 9’s in developing a yearbook. I remember being chastised by leadership about what the students wanted to published, but maybe it was for good reason? My only question is if the yearbook was scraped of the mysogony and inherent violence, what happens to the underlying culture that seems to erupt like a vissure? How do we change this? It is also interesting thinking about Alec Couros and Katia Hindlebrandt’s discussion about the end of forgetting with this scenario. Is forgetting a privilege of power?

For a bit of satire, watch Saturday Night Live’s take on the testimony:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRJecfRxbr

via Audrey Watters

Bookmarked Your DNA Is Not Your Culture by Sarah Zhang (The Atlantic)

A Spotify playlist tailored to your DNA is the latest example of brands cashing in on people’s search for identity.

Sarah Zhang discusses Spotify’s move to team up with AncestryDNA to provide richer results. To me, the strength of Spotify is big data, whether it be in choice or collections. Through the use of algorithms this data can uncover some interesting and sometimes trivial patterns, but the move to inject ancestory into the mix surely is stretching it too far?

Marginalia

If this were simply about wearing kilts or liking Ed Sheeran, these ads could be dismissed as, well, ads. They’re just trying to sell stuff, shrug. But marketing campaigns for genetic-ancestry tests also tap into the idea that DNA is deterministic, that genetic differences are meaningful. They trade in the prestige of genomic science, making DNA out to be far more important in our cultural identities than it is, in order to sell more stuff.

DNA-testing companies are careful not to use racial categories in their tests, instead reporting breakdowns of specific regions around the world. And they say that their tests are meant to bring people together by highlighting shared ancestry and challenging the idea that people are “pure.” I don’t doubt that DNA tests have sparked meaningful explorations of family history for some people and filled in the blanks for others whose histories were lost to slavery and colonialism. I do doubt that a DNA test will solve racism.

It’s a nice message. But it elides history. Mixed ancestry does not necessarily mean a harmonious coexistence, past or future. African Americans have, on average, 24 percent European ancestry. To take a genetic-ancestry test is to confront a legacy of rape and slavery—perhaps to even recognize one’s own existence as the direct result of it. There is a way to use genetics and genealogy to uncover injustices and properly account for them. The 23andMe-sponsored podcast Spit, for instance, has featured some nuanced conversations about race. But it’s not through feel-good ads that paper over the past.

via Audrey Watters

Liked Facebook Security Breach Exposes Accounts of 50 Million Users (nytimes.com)

The attack added to the company’s woes as it contends with fallout from its role in a Russian disinformation campaign.

It is hard to know what to make of a breach involving 5 million users when Facebook reportedly has 2.2 billion users. The disconcerting thing is that they took down postings about the incident:

Users who posted breaking stories about the breach from The Guardian, The Associated Press and other outlets were prompted with a notice that their posts had been taken down. So many people were posting the stories, they looked like suspicious activity to the systems that Facebook uses to block abuse of its network.

“We removed this post because it looked like spam to us,” the notice said.

Liked Creating new policies together (blog.twitter.com)

Many scholars have examined the relationship between dehumanization and violence. For example, Susan Benesch has described dehumanizing language as a hallmark of dangerous speech, because it can make violence seem acceptable, and Herbert Kelman has posited that dehumanization can reduce the strength of restraining forces against violence.

via Chris Aldrich
Liked Amazon’s Aggressive Anti-Union Tactics Revealed in Leaked 45-Minute Video by Bryan Menegus (Gizmodo)

Amazon, the country’s second-largest employer, has so far remained immune to any attempts by U.S. workers to form a union. With rumblings of employee organization at Whole Foods—which Amazon bought for $13.7 billion last year—a 45-minute union-busting training video produced by the company was sent to Team Leaders of the grocery chain last week, according to sources with knowledge of the store’s activities. Recordings of that video, obtained by Gizmodo, provide valuable insight into the company’s thinking and tactics.

Replied to An enemy of envy (austinkleon.com)

I agree with him: it will eat you alive if you keep it inside. I think one thing you can do is spit it out, cut it out, or get it out by whatever means available — write it down or draw it out on paper — and take a hard look at it so it might actually teach you something.

I think I have been caught in the envy trap before, especially when overlooked for promotion. It can be easy to get caught up in the blame game, but as Kleon highlights the benefit comes when you stop and take stock of such situations to provide the fuel to push on.
Liked Start with the spark, not the fire by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)

It’s not enough to have working code. It’s not enough to have a vision. You’ve got to have a holistic, concrete understanding of your entire venture and the context it sits within.

Your vision can be a raging fire that might change the world. But you can’t have a fire without a spark that takes hold.

Liked The mutating metric machinery of higher education (code acts in education)

HE is encompassed in the sprawling networks of actors and technologies of metric power. The data infrastructure of higher education is an accomplishment of a mobile policy network of sector agencies along with a whole host of other organizations and experts from the governmental, commercial and nonprofit sectors. A form of mobile, networked fast policy is propelling metrics across the sector, and increasingly prompting changes in organizational and individual behaviours that will transform the higher education sector to see and act upon itself as a market.

Replied to Rethinking Technology in Education (Robert Slavin’s Blog)

The technology “engine” is not quite falling out of the education “airplane.” We need not throw in our hand. Instead, it is clear that we need to re-engineer both, to ask not what is the best way to use technology, but what is the best way to engage, excite, and instruct students, and then ask how technology can contribute.

I think that technology is best considered as an enabler that is a part of a richer canvas. To appreciate this I like using the Modern Learning Canvas to place various choices in context.

via Glen Cochrane

Replied to 10 Productivity Tips For Teachers (And Students) (Primary Tech by Kathleen Morris)

Not all strategies are for everyone. I like hearing tips and workflows from others but it’s up to you to decide what will work for you.

I really like your point Kathleen that not every strategy works for everyone. The thing that I would add to that is that not every strategy that works for you will work every time.

In my new role I really had to think hard about what strategies I use to stay productive. This was working until I changed teams and subsequently work. Being a lot more collaborative and involving a centralised response system, I have tried (and failed) a number of strategies to make it all work for me. One approach was to create a Google Sheet, which was organise into categories and had a status column which allowed me to prioritise.

I liked this setup as it allowed me to easily change the statuses and add links to further information. The issue is that it involves a lot of doubling up between systems.

In the end, I am getting what needs to be done completed at the moment, but I am still looking for something more productive.

Liked Getting the mix right: Teacher guidance and inquiry learning. (Kath Murdoch)

So I have been playing around with this image – as a way to illustrate the nature of teacher guidance in inquiry – and our quest to nurture agency through it. I see it a little like a sound engineer’s mixing desk. For most of us, the tendency can be to raise our level of guidance too high and too soon and for too long. Practising the techniques of releasing responsibility, allowing some struggle, observing and listening, slowing down, waiting and explaining at the point of need means we learn to step in less frequently and with less ‘volume’ than we may have thought necessary.

Replied to The Ontario Extend 9x9x25 Challenge by Clint Lalonde (EdTech Factotum)

In October I am going to try to participate in the Ontario Extend 9x9x25 blogging challenge – 9 posts over 9 weeks each post at least 25 sentences long reflecting on teaching & learning.

As blogging habits go, I think that this is one of the more achievable Clint. I might join you as I feel my blog has been pretty quiet of late.
Liked Why I’m Leaving Micro.blog by Kicks CondorKicks Condor (kickscondor.com)

I don’t really see the difference between using FTP to pass your stuff ‘in’/‘out’ of a public_html folder and using Micro.blog’s API to pass your stuff ‘in’/‘out’. If you can get your stuff ‘in’ and ‘out’—isn’t that the key? The API is just a different kind of FTP.

Replied to Announcing WP-Lens a new, simple WordPress Theme for Photographers (CogDogBlog)

Here is another new experimenting in porting a Creative Commons licensed HTML5 Up template into a WordPress theme, say hello to WP-Lens. This joins my three previous HTML5 Up to WordPress themes.

This looks like a really slick theme Alan. It has me thinking that it would be cool as a repository. Really want to spin it up and test it out. Wondering about using it with External URL Featured Image to co-claim? Or using it with SNAP to syndicate to Flickr, Tumblr etc.

Syndicated from Read Write Collect