Month: November 2021

Replied to Start Often F*@k Achievements by wiobyrne (digitallyliterate.net)

SOFA stands for Start Often Finish rArely or Start Often F*@k Achievements

SOFA is the name of a hacker/art collective, and also the name of the principle upon which the club was founded. The point of SOFA club is to start as many things as possible as you have the ability, interest, and capacity to, with no regard or goal whatsoever for finishing those projects.

Ian, I am intrigued by the SOFA principle. It has me thinking about Adrian Camm’s discussion of ‘permission to innovate’ and the permission to fail forward. I wonder if the other part to starting often is celebrating the failures? This has me thinking about something I wrote once:

Sometimes success is not about whether an initiative continues to have a meaningful impact or falls on the wayside, rather it is about whether we learn from our failures, whether we reflect on what worked and what we could improve in the future. Just as learning is a lifelong goal, so to should success be. Instead of considering it as something achievable and able to be quantified, I believe that it is best considered as a target, an ideal to which we aim and aspire. Actually hitting the target is only one part of the goal, what is just as important is what that target is and how we go about trying to hit it.

Bookmarked Turning Text into Music (A Small AI Experiment) by dogtrax (dogtrax.edublogs.org)

Here are three (free) online sites powered by algorithms that I found and tinkered with. I am going to use the paragraph I just wrote as the intro I just wrote to this post as the text that I want each site to turn into music (See words above). Each of the sites will use the same exact text.

Kevin Hodgson dives into the world algorithmic music generation. He reviews three applications – Typatone, Langorhythm and Melobytes – that each provide different possibilities. This reminds me Robin Sloan and Jesse Solomon Clark’s use of OpenAI’s Jukebox to co-write an album.

It is also interesting to consider how AI can produce manuscripts. I can imagine a younger me using this to generate compositions to cheat learning. I probably would have claimed them as my own, rather than being hampered by writing in a language not foreign to a budding rock guitarist.

Replied to

I started reading Proust, only to find that I was unable to purchase Within a Budding Grovehttps://twitter.com/mrkrndvs/status/1464547865498308609https://twitter.com/mrkrndvs/status/1464547865498308609 with credits. I assume that there is no workaround for this?
I sometimes wonder if my strength of just diving in and getting it done is sometimes a weakness. Today I was given a spreadsheet with roughly 40000 rows to review. I started out adding in a few conditional formulas to use colour to break up the data. However, I soon realised what 40000 rows actually meant. I therefore decided to take a step back and think about how I could clean up the data. I spent sometime trying a number of approaches. After a few hours, I managed to hone the data down to roughly 4000 rows. This was a lot easier to review. It was all a reminder that time spent in reconnaissance is well spent.
Bookmarked “Rewilding,” analog-style by Rob Walker (The Art of Noticing)

TAoN No. 90: Six ways to escape algorithmic attention patterns by engaging with, you know, reality. Plus: A new icebreaker, and more

Responding to Clive Thompson’s discussion of rewilding your feeds, Rob Walker suggests some analog strategies, including engaging the senses, look out the window, keep a sound diary and appreciate a random person. This reminds me of something I wrote about PLN a few years ago.

The other day my wife and I went and visited her grandparents. As is the usual, I ended up chatting with her grandfather about anything and everything. I love these conversations as no matter how many chats we have, for I always learn something new from him about such topics as farming, fire fighting and the family history. Whether it be about communicating during a fire or the way that the various properties were divided. Although many of these situations do not impact me directly, the problem solving and reasoning behind them does. Solutions for today can so often be found in adapting and extending ideas from the past.

Bookmarked Amit Agarwal (labnol.org)

Google Forms makes it relatively easy to add such advanced date validation rules to individual fields through Regular Expressions (or regex or regexp). Think of them as search patterns and every character entered in a form field is matched against that pattern – the form can only be submitted if the patter and the user-input matches.

Amit Agarwal provides a list of Regex formulas to use to validate data within Google Forms.
I was asked to call a school today who explained we had made a mistake. It was an honest mistake, a case of misinterpretation, but a mistake none the less. I negotiated with the person that I would put together a list of errors I found and fix them. I think they were a little taken aback, they were fearing that they would have to do the laborious task of clearing things up. It made me think that although you cannot always prevent issues and errors, you can appease anxiety by being humble and saying sorry.
I was listening to someone reflect upon the perils of outsourcing compared to just doing something yourself. I had a similar experience today. As a part of my work in improving processes, I had created a spreadsheet template, which provided feedback as you went. I had someone email to say how useful it was, except it seemed to be broken. On further investigation, I realised that I had not implemented a recent update throughout the whole spreadsheet. I managed to put together a fix quickly. However, the issue was that the template had been copied 150 times and to apply the fix, I had to open upon each spreadsheet and past in the updated set of formulas. I thought for a minute whether I needed to rope somebody else in to help me. But I decided that it was my problem and best to make sure it is fixed properly, so I put my head down and hammered it out.
Liked “When I saw my peers annotating”: Student perceptions of social annotation for learning in multiple courses (emerald.com)

Social annotation (SA) is a genre of learning technology that enables the annotation of digital resources for information sharing, social interaction and knowledge production. This study aims to examine the perceived value of SA as contributing to learning in multiple undergraduate courses.,In total, 59 students in 3 upper-level undergraduate courses at a Canadian university participated in SA-enabled learning activities during the winter 2019 semester. A survey was administered to measure how SA contributed to students’ perceptions of learning and sense of community.,A majority of students reported that SA supported their learning despite differences in course subject, how SA was incorporated and encouraged and how widely SA was used during course activities. While findings of the perceived value of SA as contributing to the course community were mixed, students reported that peer annotations aided comprehension of course content, confirmation of ideas and engagement with diverse perspectives.,Studies about the relationships among SA, learning and student perception should continue to engage learners from multiple courses and from multiple disciplines, with indicators of perception measured using reliable instrumentation.,Researchers and faculty should carefully consider how the technical, instructional and social aspects of SA may be used to enable course-specific, personal and peer-supported learning.,This study found a greater variance in how undergraduate students perceived SA as contributing to the course community. Most students also perceived their own and peer annotations as productively contributing to learning. This study offers a more complete view of social factors that affect how SA is perceived by undergraduate students.

Bookmarked Histomap: Visualizing the 4,000 Year History of Global Power (visualcapitalist.com)

Histomap, published by Rand McNally in 1931, is an ambitious attempt at fitting a mountain of historical information onto a five-foot-long poster. The poster cost $1 at the time, which would equal approximately $18 when accounting for inflation.

John B. Sparks’ histomap is another great example of a visualisation:

John Spark’s creation is an admirable attempt at making history more approachable and entertaining. Today, we have seemingly limitless access to information, but in the 1930s an all encompassing timeline of history would have been incredibly useful and groundbreaking. Indeed, the map’s publisher characterized the piece as a useful tool for examining the correlation between different empires during points in history.

Liked Helping doctoral students understand PhD thesis examination expectations: A framework and a tool for supervision: by Write That PhD (SAGE Journals)

The examination of a PhD thesis marks an important stage in the PhD student journey. Here, the student’s research, thinking and writing are assessed by experts in their field. Yet, in the early stages of candidature, students often do not know what is expected of their thesis, nor what examiners will scrutinise and comment on. However, what examiners look for, expect and comment on has been the subject of recent research. This article synthesises the literature on examiner expectations into a framework and tool that can assist students to understand PhD thesis examination expectations. Suggestions of how this tool may be used as part of a broader supervision pedagogy are offered.

Bookmarked What is Design Thinking and how can teachers get started? (edte.ch)

This introductory guide to design thinking for educators lays the foundations for better problem solving and creative ideas.

Tom Barrett provides an introduction to Design Thinking. He addresses what it is, its purpose and how it can help in education.