Month: March 2019

Acquired The Witches, Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff

Acquired The Witches, Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff (Little, Brown and Company)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra, the #1 national bestseller, unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials.

It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. 

The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic.

As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, THE WITCHES is Stacy Schiff's account of this fantastical story-the first great American mystery unveiled fully for the first time by one of our most acclaimed historians.

Purchased at UCLA Store for $8.99+tax

Acquired Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve by Tom Bissell

Acquired Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve by Tom Bissell (Faber & Faber (2016))
The story of Twelve Apostles is the story of early Christianity: its competing versions of Jesus’s ministry, its countless schisms, and its ultimate evolution from an obscure Jewish sect to the global faith we know today in all its forms and permutations. In his quest to understand the underpinnings of the world’s largest religion, Tom Bissell embarks on a years-long pilgrimage to the apostles’ supposed tombs, traveling from Jerusalem and Rome to Turkey, Greece, Spain, France, India, and Kyrgyzstan. Along the way, Bissell uncovers the mysterious and often paradoxical lives of these twelve men and how their identities have taken shape over the course of two millennia. Written with empathy and a rare acumen—and often extremely funny—Apostle is an intellectual, spiritual, and personal adventure fit for believers, scholars, and wanderers alike.
Purchased at UCLA Store for $6.99+tax

👓 How to Think Like a Front-End Developer | Jeremy Keith

Read How to Think Like a Front-End Developer (adactio.com)

Alright! It’s day two of An Event Apart in Seattle. The first speaker of the day is Chris Coyier. His talk is called How to Think Like a Front-End Developer. From the website:

The job title “front-end developer” is very real: job boards around the world confirm that. But what is that job, exactly? What do you need to know to do it? You might think those answers are pretty cut and dried, but they’re anything but; front-end development is going through something of an identity crisis. In this engaging talk, Chris will explore this identity through the lens of someone who has self-identified as a front-end developer for a few decades, but more interestingly, through many conversations he’s had with other successful front-end developers. You’ll see just how differently this job can be done and how differently people and companies can think of this role—not just for the sake of doing so, but because you’ll learn to be better at your own jobs by understanding how other people are good at theirs.

👓 Update: Creating and managing a lifestream as an Early Career Academic | Kay Oddone

Read Update: Creating and managing a lifestream as an Early Career Academic by Kay OddoneKay Oddone (Linking Learning)

I began this year with the plan to create a lifestream blog – something that curated observations, discoveries, articles, images, music – in fact any digital artefact – that I encountered or spent time thinking about as I started my role as lecturer at QUT here in Brisbane Australia.

You can read about the reasons for this decision, and what I hoped it might achieve in my earlier post, but I am taking time to say that my plan has taken a left-hand turn, and being the ‘perpetually in beta, flexible, digitally fluent’ (!) person that I am, I am going with this to see where it takes me.

I had spent some time setting up the If This Then That (IFTTT) applets which I hoped would automate the process of recording my lifestream, and in doing so, I have made some discoveries.

Wahoo! Someone else out there in the ether(net) has started a digital commonplace book and she’s documenting how’s she’s doing it. I love that she’s framed doing it as part of her professional growth.

It looks like Kay has run up against some of the same problems I’ve seen in the past (and for which I’ve found some useful solutions). It would appear that she’s at least come across the IndiWeb wiki and knows about Greg (I can tell from her commonplace!) but perhaps she’s not run into examples by Aaron Davis or Ian O’Byrne yet.

I’m going to have to propose a commonplace session at IndieWebCamp Online this weekend (and maybe for PressEd)… who’s game? Kay, if you’d like to join us there (or in chat anytime), we can probably get a group of people to talk about what they’ve built, how they did it, what they want to do, and how to improve on it all.

🔖 Status as a Service (StaaS) | Remains of the Day

Bookmarked Status as a Service (StaaS) by Eugene Wei (Remains of the Day)

Status-Seeking Monkeys

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of little fortune, must be in want of more social capital."

So wrote Jane Austen, or she would have, I think, if she were chronicling our current age (instead we have Taylor Lorenz, and thank goodness for that).

Let's begin with two principles:

  • People are status-seeking monkeys*

  • People seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital

* Status-Seeking Monkeys will also be the name of my indie band, if I ever learn to play the guitar and start a band

I begin with these two observations of human nature because few would dispute them, yet I seldom see social networks, some of the largest and fastest-growing companies in the history of the world, analyzed on the dimension of status or social capital.

Hat tip: Ryan Barrett

stunning analysis of social networks as products: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service . many insights i’d never heard before. (beware though, almost 20k words!)

Reposted a tweet by WordCamp Santa ClaritaWordCamp Santa Clarita (Twitter)

📅 RSVP for IndieWebCamp Online 2019

RSVPed Attending IndieWebCamp Online 2019
IndieWebCamp Online 2019 is a gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, from graphic artists, to designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, actively work on creating for their own personal websites, and build upon each others creations.
I’ve already started brainstorming sessions and am glad that you can propose them online already in preparation for Friday!

And there’s always something magical about seeing an event on the web and being able to RSVP to it directly from my own website and having the site show my response. If only the rest of the world worked so well…

👓 Turnitin to Be Acquired by Advance Publications for $1.75B | EdSurge News

Read Turnitin to Be Acquired by Advance Publications for $1.75B (EdSurge)
A company best known (and sometimes rebuked) for its plagiarism checker has just received one of the biggest checks in the education technology ...
There is just so much wrong with what Turnitin is doing to begin with, much less a bigger corporation buying it for this sort of money.