Month: May 2019

RSVPed Attending Mike Monteiro: "Let's Destroy Silicon Valley"

ABOUT THE TALK

For the past couple of decades, the tech companies of Silicon Valley (and beyond) have run unchecked, causing havoc, destroying civil discourse, democracy, ruining personal relationships, running marketplaces of harassment and abuse, all to line their pockets. The very worst part is that they did it with our labor.

This isn’t a talk, this is a union meeting.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mike Monteiro is a designer and co-founder of Mule Design in San Francisco. He's been talking about design responsibility and ethics since before you were ready to listen. He’s written three books, including the just-released Ruined by Design.

A small number of books will be available for sale, which Mike will be able to sign after the talk. Otherwise, buy the book on Amazon. But really, just buy it and read it beforehand. It will help make the world better.

Follow him on Twitter, despite his feelings about Twitter: @monteiro

This was the event that touched off my idea to read Ruined by Design and start an IndieWeb Book club to discuss it.

👓 PRH Offers Direct Sales to Orphaned Bookstores

Read PRH Offers Direct Sales to Orphaned Bookstores (PublishersWeekly.com)
In response to Baker & Taylor closing its retail wholesale business, Penguin Random House has launched the Indies Express Program to transition B&T indie bookstore accounts to direct sales.

👓 Final Indigenous Log: The Future of the App | Eddie Hinkle

Read Final Indigenous Log: The Future of the App by Eddie HinkleEddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)
Over a year ago, I was working on Indigenous, the first app I've released in the App Store. It was a great experience but it originally started as a native share sheet extension. From there, more Micropub features were added and then as Microsub was announced, that was built in as well. Ultimately i...
The clickbait headline had me scared for a minute, then I realize there might be three times the goodness…

👓 Webinar: Research on Annotation in English and Composition | Hypothesis

Read Webinar: Research on Annotation in English and Composition by Jeremy Dean (Hypothes.is)

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article entitled “The Fall, and Rise, of Reading” arguing, in part, that digital annotation can restore discipline to college students’ reading habits (annotate it with us at that Hypothesis-enabled link). While we agree, at Hypothesis we are less concerned with whether students have read — reading compliance — than in how they read, with how their reading and annotating practices inform other skills like critical thinking and writing.

Last fall, we shared a research project on the impact of Hypothesis annotation in teaching reading and writing. That group has since conducted their research, presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and is in the process of writing up their findings and conclusions for publication. Since then we’ve learned about or been involved with several other research projects looking at the role of annotation in the teaching of composition and literature. Next Thursday, we will host a webinar bringing together scholars doing this research in conversation.

Join our free webinar, 12–1pm PT/3–4pm ET on Thursday 9 May 2019, focusing on current and future research about how annotation is being used in the English and composition disciplines, and what research shows — or could show — about the impact digital, collaborative annotation can have on student success.

Hosted by Hypothesis Director of Education Jeremy Dean, you will hear from multiple scholars about their research and outcomes:

  • Alan Reid, Assistant Professor, English, Coastal Carolina University
  • Julie Sievers, Director of Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship, Southwestern University
  • Michelle Sprouse, English and Education PhD Candidate, University of Michigan
  • Noel Brathwaite, Assistant Professor of English, SUNY Farmingdale

There will also be time for presenters and attendees to discuss questions and future research directions together.

I’m in for this… I was just talking to a composition teacher the other day and wondering exactly how one would use Hypothes.is in such a setting.
Replied to a tweet by (((Dr. Dean)))(((Dr. Dean))) (Twitter)
Boy, what I wouldn’t give to have a digital, searchable copy of every book or article I’d highlighted or annotated since I was 14! Even my handwritten commonplace books from those eras are difficult to read and search through.

Idea for a spaced repetition user interface for Hypothes.is

While I’m thinking about younger students, I thought I’d sketch out a bit of an add-on product that I wish Hypothes.is had.

Background/Set up

I was looking at tools to pull annotations out of Kindle the other day and ran across Readwise again. Part of its functionality pulls highlights and annotations out of Kindle and then it has some UI that uses the idea of spaced repetition to have you regularly review what you’ve previously read and highlighted and presumably wanted to remember or use in the future.

Of course this is very similar to other spaced repetition/flash card applications like Mnemosyne, Anki, or language apps like Memrise and Duolingo among many others. I also seem to recall that Amazon once had some UI like this built into their Kindle Notebook, but I’m not finding it at the moment, but I know they’ve changed that UI sometime in the last two years–perhaps it’s gone?

The Pitch

Given the number of learners who are using Hypothes.is, wouldn’t it be a fantastic bit of functionality if Hypothes.is had a spaced repetition UI that would allow students to easily go back and review over their prior highlights and annotations?! Presumably this could be targeted for quizzes and tests, but honestly as a lifelong learner I very frequently love using tools like Timehop or even my website’s built-in “On this day” functionality to look back over bits and pieces of things I’ve done in the past, which also includes my annotations, since I’m keeping copies of them on my website as well.

Naturally such a UI should be able to search or sort by tag, date range, or even by source(s) so that a student could more easily wrangle a particular number of sources over which they wanted to review their material–particularly as over months, years, or decades one could build up a huge library of annotations. If, as a student, I was tagging my material by class course number subject area or something similar (like edu522, for example) I could then easily dump that into such a UI and be able to do spaced repetition studying for that subject area. Masters, Ph.D. students, and even the professoriate might appreciate it for occasional spaced repetition to be nudged or reminded of ideas they’d had in the past, but which may need rekindling to put into a thesis or potential future papers.

The more I think about this, the more I’d love to see it in Hypothes.is. If it’s not something the main team takes on, perhaps it could be an add-on for a group like Remi Kalir’s who have done some interesting work with the API to create Crowdlaaers. 

I’m planning to use import/export manually with tools like Anki to do some testing this coming weekend… I wonder what open sourced code may already exist that I could simply plug my Hypothes.is data into? Hmm…

👓 📺 Bokeh is on Kickstarter | Bright Pixels

Read Bokeh is on Kickstarter by Timothy Smith (Bright Pixels)
It’s been a crazy two days. Yesterday, I published the Kickstarter for Bokeh. At the time of writing this, the project is 36 percent funded. I’m grateful to everyone who’s backed the project and shared it. There’s been a lot of stress building up to this moment. I believe in this ...
There’s not quite as much detail here as one could want. On first blush there’s nothing here when I read it because I missed the fact that there’s a video. But even with the video the details were awfully muddled about what exactly this will end up being. The fact that he mentions that it will be IndieWeb friendly could be interesting. I’m worried if some of the forthcoming microsub readers will render parts of this less useless unless it expands into other content types the way micro.blog has already.

👓 Animating URLs with Javascript and Emojis | Matthew Rayfield

Read Animating URLs with Javascript and Emojis by Matthew Rayfield (matthewrayfield.com)
You can use emoji (and other graphical unicode characters) in URLs. And wow is it great. But no one seems to do it. Why? Perhaps emoji are too exotic for normie web platforms to handle? Or maybe they are avoided for fear of angering the SEO gods? Whatever the reason, the overlapping portion on the Venn diagram of "It's Possible v.s. No One Is Doing It" is where my excitement usually lies. So I decided to put a little time into the possibilities of graphical characters in URLs. Specifically, with the possibility for animating these characters by way of some Javascript.
Aaron Parecki is right, this is pretty awesome… If only this were doable on TLDs…

I can see Aaron Parecki or Marty McGuire using the timecode bits along with their audio related pages with media fragments.

📺 "The Americans" The Great Patriotic War | Amazon Prime

Watched "The Americans" The Great Patriotic War from Amazon Prime
Directed by Thomas Schlamme. With Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys, Brandon J. Dirden, Costa Ronin. As the summit fast approaches, Elizabeth enlists Philip's help for a mission that could yield game-changing intel.

📺 "The Americans" Rififi | Amazon Prime

Watched "The Americans" Rififi from Amazon Prime
Directed by Kevin Bray. With Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys, Brandon J. Dirden, Costa Ronin. A sudden assignment pulls Elizabeth away from her family at a crucial moment. At the FBI, a major development leads Aderholt to approach Stan about an urgent investigation.