Directed by Harold Ramis. With Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliott, Stephen Tobolowsky. A weatherman finds himself inexplicably living the same day over and over again.
Rating: ★★★½
Matt Baer (Twitter)I don't think the ultimate replacement for social media will be called "social media" at all.
— Matt Baer (@ilikebeans) November 28, 2019
Listened to Lecture 5 and the first several minutes of 6 today while cooking in the kitchen.
There’s some interesting history about the ideas of law, ligatures, and links. He also has an interesting history of the words ‘apocalypse’ and ‘revelation’ which ultimately mean the same thing. Apocalypse essentially means to ‘take away the cover’. He doesn’t go into it, but this word also has historical relation to the removal of the curtain within the holy of holies, or in the New Testament the rending of said curtain at the death of Jesus. Subsequently there has obviously been a lot of semantic shift to create our modern day meaning of apocalypse.
Directed by Laura Innes. With Rob Lowe, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Janel Moloney. Dozens of Chinese stowaways are discovered in a container ship in California; Toby looks to pick a fight over school prayer with a recess appointment; Thanksgiving at the White House sees C.J. in charge of turkeys and Charlie looking for the ultimate carving knife.
Audrey Watters (Hack Education)
This talk was delivered at OEB 2019 in Berlin. Or part of it was. I only had 20 minutes to speak, and what I wrote here is a bit more than what I could fit in that time-slot.
I've been thinking a lot lately about this storytelling that we speakers do -- it's part of what I call the "ed-tech imaginary." This includes the stories we invent to explain the necessity of technology, the promises of technology; the stories we use to describe how we got here and where we are headed. And despite all the talk about our being "data-driven," about the rigors of "learning sciences" and the like, much of the ed-tech imaginary is quite fanciful. Wizard of Oz pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain kinds of stuff.
I’ve been working on a thesis lately relating to some simple ideas with relation to memory that make me think we should be looking backwards instead of forward. Part of the trouble is that as a society we’ve long forgotten some of the basic knowledge even indigenous peoples had/have, but somehow there’s more benefit and value in the information imbalance to some that we no longer have or use some of these teaching and knowledge techniques. We definitely need to bring them back.
Agitprop is a portmanteau — a combination of “agitation” and “propaganda,” the shortened name of the Soviet Department for Agitation and Propaganda which was responsible for explaining communist ideology and convincing the people to support the party. This agitprop took a number of forms — posters, press, radio, film, social networks — all in the service of spreading the message of the revolution, in the service of shaping public beliefs, in the service of directing the country towards a particular future.
Might be fun to mix up some agitprop art for various modern things. Perhaps for social media so as to frame IndieWeb as the good?
Although agitprop is often associated with the Soviet control and dissemination of information, there emerged in the 1920s a strong tradition of agitprop art and theatre — not just in the USSR. One of its best known proponents was my favorite playwright, Bertolt Brecht. Once upon a time, before I turned my attention to education technology, I was working on a PhD in Comparative Literature that drew on Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, on the Russian Formalists’ concept of ostranenie — “defamiliarization.” Take the familiar and make it unfamiliar. A radical act or so these artists and activists believed that would destabilize what has become naturalized, normalized, taken for some deep “truth.” Something to shake us out of our complacency.
Now, none of these stories is indisputably true. At best — at best — they are unverifiable. We do not know what the future holds; we can build predictive models, sure, but that’s not what these are. Rather, these stories get told to steer the future in a certain direction, to steer dollars in a certain direction. (Alan Kay once said “the best way to predict the future is to build it,” but I think, more accurately, “the best way to predict the future is to issue a press release,” “the best way to predict the future is to invent statistics in your keynote.”) These stories might “work” for some people. They can be dropped into a narrative to heighten the urgency that institutions simply must adapt to a changing world — agitation propaganda.
Many of these stories contain numbers, and that makes them appear as though they’re based on research, on data. But these numbers are often cited without any sources. There’s often no indication of where the data might have come from. These are numerical fantasies about the future.
Another word: “robots are coming for your jobs” is one side of the coin; “immigrants are coming for your jobs” is the other. That is, it is the same coin. It’s a coin often used to marshall fear and hatred, to make us feel insecure and threatened. It’s the coin used in a sleight of hand to distract us from the profit-driven practices of capitalism. It’s a coin used to divide us so we cannot solve our pressing global problems for all of us, together.
Directed by Alex Graves. With Rob Lowe, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Janel Moloney. The President and NASA plan a TV event for a probe's landing on Mars; satellite photographs show a suspicious-looking fire in Russia; Leo asks Toby and Josh to decide on the next postage stamp; Sam and C.J. have personal reasons for not wanting to accompany the President to a concert.
David Shanske (david.shanske.com)For IndieWebCamp Berlin 2 2019, I built this proof of concept feature in the WordPress Admin. It does actually work, but the functionality that enables the posting needs a lot more backend work before it will work properly. Problem is that the WordPress post endpoint does not allow you to set a t...
Directed by Scott Winant. With Rob Lowe, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Janel Moloney. Toby wants to use a bipartisan breakfast to discuss real issues instead of making it a staged event; Sam floats the idea of moving the press room across the street; Leo wants Josh to apologize to a columnist on his behalf; Leo and Toby realize they need to start thinking about reelection.
Emily Hanford (threadreaderapp.com)Thread: There was a session today at #NCTE19, the annual conference of @ncte, called "Misreading the Science of Reading." I want to share some thoughts, and some reading material, to add to the conversation. #elachat #ilachat 1/x I've been an education reporter for a decade+. A few yrs ago, I knew nothing abt the "science of reading." But in the past 3 yrs, I've read thousands of pages of books, articles, research papers. 2/x I've interviewed hundreds of researchers, teachers, school leaders, tutors, parents, students and struggling readers. I've visited 9 states. And I've been shocked to learn that: 3/x
hat tip:
Thread: There was a session today at #NCTE19, the annual conference of @ncte, called "Misreading the Science of Reading." I want to share some thoughts, and some reading material, to add to the conversation. #elachat #ilachat 1/x
— Emily Hanford (@ehanford) November 22, 2019
Directed by Lou Antonio. With Rob Lowe, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Janel Moloney. Sam meticulously prepares a speech for the President to give to the environmental lobby, but Toby wants to sneak in some criticism of their failure to condemn environmental terrorism. Leo tries to convince the President to support his pet project - a missile defense shield - despite its continued failure to produce results, and the fact that it likely contravenes an anti-ballistic missile treaty....
Amanda Rush (Amanda Unvarnished)Initially I subscribed to someone else’s Harry Potter film scores playlist on Spotify, but today I decided to make my own. I did this because I wanted to include the bonus tracks from the original scores as well as the scores for Cursed child and the two Fantastic Beasts movies.
A deep examination and self-reflection on photo sharing of the last decade, Summer Bedard’s article looks at how the previously intimate, cumbersome experience has morphed into the edited, contrived perfection found on Instagram.
The explosion of people, marked a shift from having a community to having an audience. This ultimately changed the mental model of what gets posted. People act differently in their living room than they do on stage. They may feel more vulnerable and guarded. You’re sharing with a community, but working for an audience. ❧
–November 28, 2019 at 09:42PM
I would love to see a future where enjoying photos becomes more like enjoying music. Spotify gives you an easy way to consider options by assessing your mood and putting together an appropriate playlist that feels personal. We could do the same for images. Can you imagine opening Spotify and having it blast a random song immediately? Our current Instagram home screen is the visual equivalent of a playlist mashup of country, classical, techno, hip hop, and polka. ❧
I like the idea of this. Can someone build it please?
–November 28, 2019 at 09:46PM
What if you could use AI to control the content in your feed? Dialing up or down whatever is most useful to you. If I’m on a budget, maybe I don’t want to see photos of friends on extravagant vacations. Or, if I’m trying to pay more attention to my health, encourage me with lots of salads and exercise photos. If I recently broke up with somebody, happy couple photos probably aren’t going to help in the healing process. Why can’t I have control over it all, without having to unfollow anyone. Or, opening endless accounts to separate feeds by topic. And if I want to risk seeing everything, or spend a week replacing my usual feed with images from a different culture, country, or belief system, couldn’t I do that, too? ❧
Some great blue sky ideas here.
–November 28, 2019 at 09:48PM
Directed by Christopher Misiano. With Rob Lowe, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Janel Moloney. While a live TV show is broadcast from the West Wing following the State of the Union, the staff must covertly deal with a hostage situation in Colombia. CJ learns that a special guest at the state of the union has a black mark on his record that could taint the administration. Ainsley Hayes is afraid to meet the President in person.
Annotation is one way to remix the web, Twitter is another. The two approaches can play nicely together but, to make best use of the combination, it helps to understand what happens when you tweet a Hypothesis direct link.
