Matt Maldre (Twitter)I love love love Instapaper. I should pay for premium. But I don’t like that all my highlights and notes get locked up in their proprietary system.
— Matt Maldre (@mattmaldre) December 30, 2019
Right now, I save all my Instapaper articles to PDF and make my highlights/marginalia in the PDF. I get to keep it.
Customers’ physical music collections may be lost forever
Jim Luke (EconProph)Herein, against my better judgement, I wade into the Great Instructure social media wars of 2019. Last week, Instructure Inc., the publicly traded (NYSE: INST) company announced it had agreed to go private and sell itself to private equity firm Thoma Bravo. For people who teach in higher education this is big news. Instructure, is the current name for the company founded in 2008 that created and sells the Canvas LMS. Canvas in the last decade has toppled the previous king-of-the-LMS’s, Blackboard. Canvas is now widely reported to have largest market share of higher ed LMS market at least in North America. Moodle, the open source system, appears to dominate outside North America.
Capitalists and market-thinkers inevitably seek to enclose the commons, privatizing benefits and externalizing costs onto society.❧
It’s nice to see this reminder every now and then.
–highlighted December 09, 2019 at 09:00PM
Some pragmatic and solid analysis here. Better than some of the FUD I’ve seen bandied about.
Jim Groom from bavatuesdays
Tomorrow at 12 PM Eastern/ 9 AM Pacific I’ll be be hosting a Connected Courses discussion that will explore the IndieWeb movement as a people-centered response to the corporate web. How do core IndieWeb principles such as owning your content, remaining better connected, and redefining control online intersect with the values of connected learning? Take a bit of time tomorrow and join myself, Mikhail Gershovich, Ben Werdmuller, Erin Jo Richey, and Simon Thomson to find out more.
[Withknown is] the posterchild of the IndieWeb.
— Jim Groom
I’ll agree that it is pretty darn awesome!
Some slight rephrasings from Ben in the video that I thought were spot on:
IndieWeb: allowing people to connect online without caring about what platforms or services they’re using.
IndieWeb puts the learner first. The LMS, which primarily serves an administrative function, should not be the center of the process.
Todd Haselton,Megan Graham (CNBC)Google collects the purchases you've made, including from other stores and sites such as Amazon, and saves them on a page called Purchases.
Why are we doing this?! It’s not TwitterCamp. It’s a W-O-R-D-C-A-M-P!! Why can’t we ask for and put our own domain names (running WordPress, natch…) in our registration and on our name tags?! Let’s get with the program people… Twitter is nice, but obviously WordPress on a domain name we own and control is far better.
Innovate Pasadena: Friday Coffee Meetup from YouTubeI was ten years into a career as a user experience designer making new digital products when diabetes blew my family's life apart. The complexity and relentlessness of the burden of care that came with my youngest daughter's diagnosis at 1.5 years old, were overwhelming. I learned that people with diabetes are always 10 minutes of inattention away from a coma. Run your blood sugar too low and risk brain injury or death. Run too high and you do cumulative damage to your organs, nerves and eyes. And as a designer and hardware hacker I couldn't accept the limitations and poor User Experience I was seeing in all the tools we were given to deal with it.
Then I discovered Nightscout (a way to monitor my daughter's blood sugar in real time from anywhere in the world) and Loop (a DIY open sourced, artificial pancreas system that checks blood sugar and adjusts insulin dosing every five minutes 24/7) and the #WeAreNotWaiting community that produced them. For the first time I saw the kinds of tools I needed and true power of solutions that come from the people living with the problem. When I learned about the Tidepool's project to take Loop through FDA approval and bring it to anyone who wants to use it to give the same freedom and relief that we've experienced from it, I had to get involved. Now we are taking an open source software through regulatory approval and using real-life user data from the DIY community for our clinical trial in a process that is turning heads in the industry. We'll get into the many ways this story demonstrates ways that user driven design, open source models and a counterculturally collaborative approach with regulators are shifting the incentives and changing the landscape toward one more favorable to innovation.
I can’t wait for Chuck Chugumulung and the gang to get the video for this week up on YouTube so I can share it with colleagues.
Based on what I’ve heard, it might not be a completely terrible thing to class what the IndieWeb is working on fixing as a broad public health issue–but in its case a mental health one instead of a pancreas and diet related one.
Not sure what to expect at a camp? Here are some additional details for both in-person and remote attendance.
You don’t know how liberating this feels. (yes, I backed up 13 years of cruft first) screen shot of pinboard.in with all bookmarks & tags removed.
Manton Reece (manton.org)Micro.blog can now import blog posts from Medium. You can request a .zip archive of your content from Medium.com, then go to Posts → Import on Micro.blog to upload the file. Because Medium no longer supports custom domain names, we don’t think it’s a good long-term solution for blogging. If yo...
John Naughton (the Guardian)For example, the idea of “data ownership” is often championed as a solution. But what is the point of owning data that should not exist in the first place? All that does is further institutionalise and legitimate data capture. It’s like negotiating how many hours a day a seven-year-old should be allowed to work, rather than contesting the fundamental legitimacy of child labour. Data ownership also fails to reckon with the realities of behavioural surplus. Surveillance capitalists extract predictive value from the exclamation points in your post, not merely the content of what you write, or from how you walk and not merely where you walk. Users might get “ownership” of the data that they give to surveillance capitalists in the first place, but they will not get ownership of the surplus or the predictions gleaned from it – not without new legal concepts built on an understanding of these operations. ❧
