Month: February 2021

Bookmarked Edtech sci-fi (code acts in education)

Here’s a list the lovely people on Twitter suggested of edtech sci-fi texts, TV, and film. Three were even suggestions of existing compilations of edtech sci-fi: a 2015 piece by Audrey Watters on Education in Science Fiction, a collection by Stephen Heppell, and an entry on Education in SF at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Check those out too. I’ve alphabetized the list but nothing more. Some people added short descriptions, which I’ve paraphrased, and others links, which you’ll have to mine the replies to find, I’m afraid.

Ben Williamson collects together a collection of science fiction texts which depict education. It would be interesting to have a reader collating excerpts from each that could be used as a provocation to “engage with the complex social, political, economic and and environmental crises of our time.”
Replied to Courage to Continue by wiobyrne (digitallyliterate.net)

Kevin Roose on Clubhouse, the invitation-only social audio app. Clubhouse has been super hot over the last couple of months.

Ian, I really enjoyed Kevin Roose’s thoughts on Clubhouse, especially the quote you shared:

Every successful social network has a life cycle that goes something like: Wow, this app sure is addictive! Look at all the funny and exciting ways people are using it! Oh, look, I can get my news and political commentary here, too! This is going to empower dissidents, promote free speech and topple authoritarian regimes! Hmm, why are trolls and racists getting millions of followers? And where did all these conspiracy theories come from? This platform should really hire some moderators and fix its algorithms. Wow, this place is a cesspool, I’m deleting my account.

I must admit that I have not been invited to the platform and have no intention on using it if I was. What I do not get is how this innovative technology is different from Voxer or Discourse? I guess I may never know. For now, I will just stick to listening to podcasts.

I hope you are safe.

Aaron

Bookmarked Scrum Project Management | Inquiry Hub for Educators (educators.inquiryhub.org)

Scrum is one of several forms of agile project management. One of the key designers of Scrum is Jeff Sutherland. There are many online videos describing the process, roles, and terminology. Here is one video summarizing the book and outlining the process:

A breakdown the scrum process as outlined in The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland

ᔥ “Dᴀᴠɪᴅ Tʀᴜss @datruss” in Dᴀᴠɪᴅ Tʀᴜss ∞β on Twitter: “Resources for the presentation shared here: https://t.co/JrZfxsUjpO” / Twitter ()

Bookmarked CSS: The Perfect Print Stylesheet (jotform.com)

Even today, there are still many people that want to print out the entire internet. This can have many reasons. Maybe a team seeks to discuss an article’s content in a meeting. Or maybe somebody wants to read your article somewhere where they don’t have an internet connection. To satisfy these people, each website requires a CSS file for printing.

Andreas Hecht discusses how to add a CSS stylesheet for printing posts.

ᔥ “Alan Levine
@cogdog” in Alan Levine on Twitter: “For future updates to all my WordPress theming – “CSS: The Perfect Print Stylesheet” https://t.co/JdeWhBzsqM I only found this in poking around the source HTML of someone’s web site, and a toast to developers who put credit URLs in their comments. Cheers!” / Twitter ()

Liked The Number Ones: Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” (Stereogum)

Really, a lot of Houston’s best bits on “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” aren’t even about what she can do with her voice. They’re pure personality: The whoo as the song first kicks in, the giggle on the breakdown, the “now get with this” aside. Walden has said that the vamp on the breakdown — “Don’tyouwannadance Sayyouwannadance don’tyouwannadance!” — was Houston’s idea. Houston never bothers to sell the sad parts of the song, the stuff about loneliness calling. She knows she doesn’t need to. The song comes from the perspective of someone who wants to find joy in companionship, in bodies moving. The vocal comes from someone who’s already achieved that goal. It’s aspirational.

Replied to

I read this tweet Graham. I use Granary and a feed reader to reclaim control. Maybe not ideal, but neither are the algorithms I guess?
Liked 100 Years Ago in Photos: A Look Back at 1921 by Alan Taylor (The Atlantic)

A century ago, Russia was enduring a terrible famine, the Irish Free State was created, U.S. President Warren Harding was inaugurated, the Tulsa Race Massacre took place in Oklahoma, a new machine called a “dishwasher” was introduced, New York’s Madison Square Garden was home to “the world’s largest indoor swimming pool,” and much more. Please take a moment to look back at some of the events and sights from around the world 100 years ago.

Replied to The masks, the music, the magic: remembering the genius of Daft Punk (Double J)

“We had this love of creation and this respect for creativity in all its forms. Music was only one aspect of it.”

With the release of Epilogue, Daft Punk have announced that they are calling it quits:

It has been good reading various pieces of reflection and commentary about their legacy:

Beyond the singles, their visual identity, interstellar mystique, and party-music ethos inspired generations of artists across genres. LCD Soundsystem’s breakout song, “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House,” captured the duo’s paradoxical embodiment of hipster cool even as their singles dominated airwaves. They released several batches of incredible holiday merch. They were sampled by R&B greats Janet Jackson and Jazmine Sullivan, parodied in Family Guy and Powerpuff Girls, and celebrated in art galleries around the world.

Daft Punk were nowhere and everywhere. Especially toward the end of their 28-year run, the Parisian dance music pioneers operated under a veil of secrecy, disappearing for long stretches between projects and hiding their faces behind robot masks whenever they did return to the spotlight. They’ve essentially spent the eight years since their hit-spawning, Grammy-winning 2013 swan song Random Access Memories steadily fading from view. Yet by the time they announced their breakup today, they had become such a presence within pop culture that their music was regularly manifesting on some of the grandest stages imaginable, be it Abel Tesfaye stalking the stadium to their computerized backing vocals at the Super Bowl halftime show or a fish-like Techno Troll spinning “One More Time” at an underwater rave in Trolls World Tour.

Of course what I hadn’t appreciated was this was all warming up to Random Acces Memories (2013), I initially dismissed this record personally as all the air play of Get Lucky and it’s commercial success really put me off however once I finally sat down and listened to the record I realised the master piece it is.

This is so far from the worst thing that has happened in the past year but I am unexpectedly emotional about this.

My favourite thing for today is people replying to tweets about Daft Punk and saying that what they do isn’t even that HARD if you just knew ANYTHING about music. Best coffee-break-tweet-scroll in a while.

Perhaps French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had it right when he said that profits can be derived from “disinterestedness”. Indeed Daft Punk’s marketing succeeded because of its highlighted rejection of the most obvious, unromantic mechanisms of commerce.

Many have discussed how Daft Punk has soundtracked their lives. I think that soundtrack is the right word. Although I have all their albums and know all the drops and clicks to annoy my children with when we play their music – thanks Trolls World Tour – however, much of their music has been on the periphery. It was not until Random Access Memories that I was truly captured by the music. Similar to my recent experience with Tame Impala, I think that this was as much about where I was at with my tastes. In particular, I was taken by the blend of sounds presented, with my highlight being Giorgio by Moroder

My hope is that it might be the end of one chapter and the start of another. For example, Thomas Bangalter has ventured out beyond the duo in the past with Stardust. As Tom Breihan suggests:

Daft Punk hadn’t made any music in the eight years before they posted that video. This wasn’t a band breakup. It was the retirement of a shared persona. It was the end of the helmets.

Liked Adults made the media mess (aare.edu.au)

Social media platform Facebook pulled the plug on Australian news last week after a tussle between the government and the digital giant. What does that mean for Australian educators and students? What are the ways we can combat misinformation and disinformation? And how far along are we in the struggle to teach media literacy (answers from a professor and a PhD student)? How important is it for students to create their own content? PLUS read an excerpt from Kid Reporter, a handbook for young investigators (and their teachers) by Saffron Howden and Dhana Quinn; and Peter Greste’s review of the book.

Bookmarked An Appeal for Friction Writing (THR Blog)

Our writing process lacks sufficient resistance, hesitation, reconsideration.

Richard Hughes Gibson pushes back on the frictionless experience to help foster clearer judgement.

My case for friction in writing (particularly writing on the Internet) echoes and amplifies Kosslyn’s concern that frictionless design is partly to blame for the rapid spread of misinformation. When writing meets no impediments, we can easily become links in a chain through which misinformation spreads. Yet my appeal for friction writing goes to something even more basic: When you encounter (and pay heed to) resistance in your writing, you have the chance to change not only your words but also your mind—and even to consider whether you need to be writing something at all, or at least at this moment.

Borrowing from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg he talks about the power and potential of the waste book. This allows us to write more and share better.

This touches on Ian O’Byrne’s discussion of thinking twice before sharing that hot take:

I’d urge you to focus on first doing the work yourself before you move to the local context. Read up. Problematize your perspectives. Question your assumptions and biases. Listen to others.

Personally, I find sharing first in my own space before sharing elsewhere builds in a healthy level of friction. This also reminds me of Clay Shirky’s discussion of junking perfectly good workflows to maintain attention.

At the end of every year, I junk a lot of perfectly good habits in favor of awkward new ones.
…
Some of those changes stick, most don’t, but since every tool switch involves a period of disorientation and sub-optimal use, I have to make myself be willing to bang around with things I don’t understand until I do understand them. This is the opposite of a dream setup; the thing I can least afford is to get things working so perfectly that I don’t notice what’s changing in the environment anymore.

ᔥ “Snakes & Ladders” in Murmurations, Months, Masters • Buttondown ()

Replied to The Final Descent of Dean Cummings (outsideonline.com)

From the outside, things seemed perfect for the former world extreme skiing champion: he had a family, a successful guiding business, and unending adventure out his front door in Valdez, Alaska. But something dark festered beneath the surface.

I am a real sucker for such sad stories of intrigue, such as Dean Cummings, Lee Holloway or Aaron Hernandez.
Liked Reflections on Teaching through the Screen by Sean Michael MorrisSean Michael Morris (Sean Michael Morris)

How is that responding and revising done? Well, if I have any “expert” advice to offer, it would be this:

  1. Change the way you teach. Ask what do you want to know about learners from the very start of your relationship? What should they know about you? What barriers might exist that will inhibit your connection to students and from student to student?
  2. Develop a digital literacy that’s an interpersonal one. Always ask: “Who is not in the room who could be?” Allow time in synchronous meetings and collaborations for connecting and relationship-building. Find back-channel and ungraded spaces for communication, like virtual office or “coffee” hours. Perhaps most importantly, develop empathy for one another in virtual or digitally-inflected spaces. But at the same time, don’t assume you understand the challenges students face. Empathy is best developed by listening.
  3. Imagine your own digital pedagogy. Ask yourself: What counts as digital? What is your overall pedagogical approach, and how does that translate or not translate to digital environments? What is the most important part of your pedagogy that you don’t want to lose when you teach online?

The truth is that education didn’t need COVID-19 to make it necessary to ask these kinds of questions. As educators, we are all always already called to develop a critical consciousness about our work. But the pandemic has brought into greater focus that our assumptions—about what’s been happening in classrooms and behind the scenes and online in education—are less informed than we would like to believe. We don’t get to watch the screen and act like normal, because at every turn there’s a drag queen superstar waiting to remind us that things are not normal, and in order for any normal to return, we will have to invent it ourselves.

Bookmarked 50 Great Classic Novels Under 200 Pages (Literary Hub)

We are now past the mid-way point in February, which is technically the shortest month, but is also the one that—for me, anyway—feels the longest. Especially this year, for all of the reasons that you already know. At this point, if you keep monthly reading goals, even vague ones, you may be looking for few a good, short novels to knock out in an afternoon or two. Last year, I wrote about the best contemporary novels under 200 pages, so now I must turn my attention to my favorite short classics—which represent the quickest and cheapest way, I can tell you in my salesman voice, to become “well-read.”

Emily Temple follows up her list of 50 short contemporary novels with a focus on class novels.
Liked Getting personal with teacher inquiry: one school’s approach. (kathmurdoch.com.au)

I have been fortunate to have partnered with Bonython School in Canberra for several years now. It has been wonderful to watch the careful and thoughtful way the leadership team and the staff as a whole have worked on growing a culture of Inquiry from the ground up. As is the case for several schools I work with, one feature of their work is the expectation that educators will engage in their own inquiry journeys throughout the year. I invited deputies Marc Warwick and Amanda Hawkins to chat to me about their approach, late last year and share some key moments from our conversation including some teacher reflections here.

Bookmarked Opinion | Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole by Charlie Warzel (nytimes.com)

Critical thinking, as we’re taught to do it, isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation.

Warzel profiles Mike Caulfield and his work with four moves and SIFT.

SIFT has its limits. It’s designed for casual news consumers, not experts or those attempting to do deep research. A reporter working on an investigative story or trying to synthesize complex information will have to go deep. But for someone just trying to figure out a basic fact, it’s helpful not to get bogged down. “We’ve been trained to think that Googling or just checking one resource we trust is almost like cheating,” he said. “But when people search Google, the best results may not always be first, but the good information is usually near the top. Often you see a pattern in the links of a consensus that’s been formed. But deeper into the process, it often gets weirder. It’s important to know when to stop.”

It is interesting to think about this alongside pieces from Tim Harford and Edward Snowden which both emphasise the importance of curiosity. Caulfield is not against curiousity, but instead about not being pulled down the rabbit hole.

That natural human mind-set is a liability in an attention economy. It allows grifters, conspiracy theorists, trolls and savvy attention hijackers to take advantage of us and steal our focus. “Whenever you give your attention to a bad actor, you allow them to steal your attention from better treatments of an issue, and give them the opportunity to warp your perspective,” Mr. Caulfield wrote.

Liked That might not be the right question (Seth’s Blog)

Are you exposing yourself to new inputs and new situations, and challenging yourself to find more interesting ideas?

Are you pushing the ideas you have further, making them more complete, turning them from hunches to notions to ideas to theories?

Are you publishing your theories, sharing your reasoning and having your ideas collide with the real world in service of making things better?