Month: December 2020
“In a typical school day you’re not really as a young person given an opportunity where you would feel engaged, comfortable and safe enough to actually let someone know that you’re struggling, or how you’re feeling,” Ian Fagan said.
I am intrigued as to how this differs from other more generic
? I am going to assume that it is more focused.I agree with Richard Olsen that this will be the first of many in this space:
Interesting article in The Age today. We’ve been doing something similar. They seem to be focused only on one part of the continuous performance stack. Wonder if they will eventually expand beyond surveys to 1on1s and OKRs? The first of many in this space? https://t.co/0YEzoWNTQF
— Richard Olsen (@richardolsen) December 29, 2020
The question I have is that as more enter this space where does one solution start and another stop? I am also interested in the blurring of the lines with some of these things, especially when they start including surveillance and artificial intelligence.
We are long overdue for a reckoning with concentrated corporate power in every industry. The entertainment and telecoms giants who are cheerleading a turn in the barrel for their archrivals in Silicon Valley are making a bet that a revitalized, muscular antitrust will neuter tech, and then stop. They’re wrong. The momentum building for breakups and other anti-monopoly actions is unstoppable.
Bork’s fundamental belief was that if you stared really hard at anti-monopoly laws like the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, you’d find that their drafters never really worried about monopolies. Rather, they only worried about harmful monopolies—which is to say, instances in which companies do something nakedly anticompetitive in a way that results in an immediate increase in prices. Bork’s big idea was that unless you could prove that some monopolistic crime would raise near-term consumer prices, it shouldn’t be prosecuted.
And now, after 40 years of non-enforcement of monopoly laws, the world has:
· five giant publishers
· four giant movie studios
· three giant record labels
· two giant brewers
· one giant eyewear maker
One of the main reasons we are where we are is because Google was not regulated early.
There’s a Silicon Valley consensus that Google survived its infancy because Microsoft elected not to strangle it in its cradle, the way the Beast of Redmond had done with Netscape and other upstarts of the previous decade. This forbearance is attributed to the Justice Department’s long (and ultimately unsuccessful) antitrust action over the Windows monopoly. The theory goes that Microsoft had its predatory spirit tamed after a decade-long regulatory siege and was frightened of what an all-out assault on Google might provoke.
Doctorow suggests that today’s start-ups are really just glorified hiring processes:
Today, the best a budding technologist can hope for is to do a fake startup whose “product” exists only to demonstrate that they and their team can successfully complete an ambitious project. These post-grad practicums are the precursor to an “aqui-hire,” when a large firm buys out a startup solely to get a proven team, shutting down its products after the acquisition. Venture capital is now a glorified talent agency, and the “acquisition” is split between “investors” and “founders” in lieu of a finder’s fee and a hiring bonus.
I have been looking at getting a Volca Sampler 2 to compliment it and provide some rhythmic contrast. One of the issues I have is finding a power supply that would work for multiple Volcas. Just not sold on the cost of the Korg adaptor, especially when I would have to buy two. Wondering if you bought the official adaptor or if you are just running off batteries?
Long term, I wonder about about the transition from no code to full code. As the piece went on and more questions were raised about what was possible, I wonder what happens when the project goes beyond its initial beginnings. I had the same question in reading David Peterson’s piece.
This is why I am interested in cross-overs like Alan Levine’s calling cards for simple websites as they offer both a relatively easy entry point, as well as the potential to go further if required.
The burst of activity and high-tech acumen thrills many space fans. But it is making many others quite nervous. Opening up space to a frenzy of private actors could, they agree, produce measurable benefits back on planet Earth—making crucial scientific research, environmental monitoring, and everyday communication cheaper. But the critics are quick to note as well that the history of privatization is spotty at best, with plenty of civically brutal knock-on effects: concentrations of monopolistic power, enfeebled democratic control, and widespread environmental degradation. We’ve seen all those problems appear on Earth as all manner of traditional social goods, from education and housing to pension plans and mass transit, have been targeted for private-sector control. Next up, it seems, is the great beyond.
Low-Earth orbit—roughly, anything that’s whizzing around the planet no more than 1,200 miles high—is the zone where SpaceX and many other New Space firms seek to operate. And simple math—together with the history of virtually all new forms of transportation—tells us that the more things go up there, and without a clear fix on where objects are in space, the greater the odds are that those things are going to start slamming into one another by accident.
One particularly grim vision of the future that haunts astronomers is the “Kessler syndrome,” proposed by the astrophysicist Donald Kessler in 1978. Kessler hypothesized that space clutter could reach a tipping point: One really bad collision could produce so much junk that it would trigger a chain reaction of collisions. This disaster scenario would leave hundreds of satellites eventually destroyed, and create a ring of debris that would make launching any new satellites impossible, forever.
The other point of discussion is the moon. At the moment, this is all remarkably unregulated. The issue with this is that the path for such exploration is often set early on.
I know people like to say Ed Tech won’t save you, and that is a good antidote to the ed tech saviour hype, but in 2020 educational technologists really did save education (by which I don’t mean silicon valley profiteers, but the small teams within unis, colleges, schools, etc). People who were often buffeted around an institution, not treated with appropriate respect and under-resourced were suddenly called upon to keep the whole thing going. That’s a hell of a spotlight shift.
If you were to write a love letter to the world what would it be? A Crowdsourced Creativity Project In the midst of this global pandemic and subsequent isolation, I think about my friends and acquaintances all over the globe…they are gazing at the same moon, after all. This brought me to putting out a creative challe
Dubbed The War on 2020, it features an all-stars line up of the best satirical comedians in the country, directed by Jenna Owen and Victoria Zerbst (SBS The Feed), and written and performed by Mark Humphries (ABC 7.30), Nina Oyama (Utopia), Sami Shah (ABC Radio), Steph Tisdell (Deadly Funny), Nat Damena (SBS The Feed) and James Schloeffel (The Shovel). The series will also utilise the writing talents of Evan Williams and Rebecca Shaw.
They cover a range of topics, including the absurdity of QAnon, Dan Andrews being labelled a dictator, the frenzied stockpiling of toilet paper and the solidarity around the Black Lives Matter movement. However, the highlight of them all was :
New research shows the #IStandWithDan and #DictatorDan warring Twitter hashtags were pushed by a small number of orchestrated and hyper-partisan accounts.
New research shows they were driven by a small number of fringe, hyper-partisan accounts — many of them anonymous “sockpuppet” accounts created specifically to support either side, but posting as an independent third party.
Although it is not clear if there was a central organisation behind the campaigns, but the ‘Dictator Dan’ message did align with the News Corp papers and Sky News.
On a side note, I think the War on 2020 team captured the absurdity of in their skit:
I brought my father to a site where workers had removed the thick foliage so archaeologists could thoroughly map the site. Another archaeologist and I excitedly discussed the visible architectural features – patios, terraces, the stubs of walls. Finally, my dad threw his hands up in the air and said “All I see are rocks!”
But our trained eyes recognized that the piles of stones or earthen mounds we saw were suspiciously aligned. Stare at archaeological sites long enough and you’ll notice them too.
Mark Binelli talks about the way in which Frederick Wiseman makes documentaries from found objects.
He sees himself, he told me, like an artist who makes work from found objects, except in his case, the art is assembled from found events.
Sometimes such a practice involves instilling constraints as Matthew Herbert outlines in his ‘found sounds’ manifesto.
This reminds me of what Alan Levine calls a
and being open to the space you are inNational Geographic magazines and Indiana Jones movies might have you picturing archaeologists excavating near Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge and Machu Picchu. And some of us do work at these famous places.
Finding that evidence can be as simple as strolling past clearly distinguishable ruins – ah, there are some broken pots or carved stones right over there. It can be as complex as using lasers, satellite imagery and other new geophysical techniques to reveal long-lost structures. The right skills and tools are helping researchers locate traces from the past that would have been overlooked even a few decades ago.
So it felt like my KPIs were just out of my reach. I had to be perfect – go for two an over and take five-for. It felt like I was always having to evolve as a cricketer, but it felt like when I evolved into something, I’d get told I immediately needed to change. ‘That’s not the right one, do this.'”
If you told me when I was 15 that I would have done these things in my life, I would not have believed you one little bit. It’s pretty cool. I’ve got a bloody great job.”
Even if that job does occasionally involve having a s**t day.
Too often, family involvement in schools is limited to baking for cake stalls and participating in fund-raising, Harvard Lecturer Karen Mapp says that it is important to move beyond the bake sale to more interaction around learning and developmental goals, and to provide tools for parents to support these goals.
Family engagement in education is about parents and carers, schools, and communities working together to ensure that everyone plays a positive role in a child’s learning. Teachers need to find effective ways to honor the wealth of knowledge that families possess. A touchstone question for teachers to ask parents is, “What is something you would like me to know about your child?”
Paterson also shares links to a few resources, including Partners Education in A Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family–School Partnerships and Learning Potentials website.
This is an interesting topic to consider in regards to COVID and the move to online learning. As Robert Schuetz touched on a few years ago:
Our infrastructure is in place, now it’s a matter of creating the expectations and dedicating the time necessary for teachers and parents to collaboratively advance student learning for all.
While Greg Miller describes this challenge as a battle for the ‘new normal’:
One of the ongoing challenges of designing a ‘new normal’ for preschool to post school has been to clarify how we work in partnership with parents to nurture faith filled curious children to become creative contributors and innovative problem solvers for a changing world.
I also wonder how this all plays out in regards to something like the Modern Learning Canvas? Clearly, it has a place in regards to ‘culture’ and ‘policy’. However, it makes me wonder about the consequences for the role of the educator and the pedagogical beliefs that may align with all of this.