Month: December 2019

Alternate formats of An Urgency of Teachers by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris

I’m gearing up my reading list for the holidays. I wanted to add An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris. Seemingly I can only find .html, .azw3, and .pdf copies of the book, and I’d far prefer an .epub version. Fortunately the book has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0), so I’ve spent some time this morning to convert an original and made myself an .epub version for my Android devices.

I’m happy to share it if others are looking for the same and don’t have the ability (or frankly the time) to make the conversion. I also have a .mobi version (for Kindle) of the text as well since it didn’t require much additional work. These are exact replicas with no changes and come with the same CC BY-NC 4.0 license. If Jesse or Sean want copies to make available on their site, I’m happy to send them along. 

If you have the means, please be sure to make a donation to help support the book and Sean and Jesse’s work.

Book cover of An Urgency of Teachers

Listened to Alan Levine by Terry Greene from Gettin' Air The Open Pedagogy Podcast | voicEd

Terry Greene (@greeneterry) speaks with Alan Levine (@cogdog) about the endlessly amazing work Alan has done in the open over the years, including his involvement in the Ontario Extend project and where that work is headed.

Cover art for Gettin' Air

I’m starting to see a pattern in these episodes. 😉

Terry puts a hard out at about 30 minutes and teases the audience by saying to the guest something like “I want to have you back again, our time was too short.” Some of the older episodes are old enough, he’d surely have had guests back by now. What he’s doing is great, but I have to inure myself against the disappointment of great guests coming back (any time real soon.)

Listened to Helen DeWaard by Terry Greene from Gettin' Air The Open Pedagogy Podcast | voicEd

Terry Greene (@greeneterry) speaks with Helen DeWaard. One of Canada’s openest of open educators, they chat about Helen’s plans for her winter courses in Lakehead University’s Faculty of Education, her involvement in Virtually Connecting, and her eCampusOntario Open Education Fellowship.

Cover art for Gettin' Air

Terry does a great job of exploring his personal context with Helen to give us a fantastic “frame” though which to see her. I liked that he asked her questions about who she follows/recommends. It’s a great way to get to not only know someone, but to get to know other interesting people.

There’s a great description and some history of the idea of Virtually Connecting here.

Helen mentions her one word projects and it reminds me that I should ask Aaron Davis how his 2019 word has been going. I should spend some time thinking this week and next to see if I can’t pick a word for 2020. I’m sort of thinking that “memory” may be an apropos one.

Listened to John Stewart by Terry Greene from Gettin' Air The Open Pedagogy Podcast | voicEd

In this episode Terry Greene chats with @JohnStewartPhD, Assistant Director for the Office of Digital Learning at the University of Oklahoma. The main topic of discussion is the wonderfully successful Domain of One’s Own project, OU Create, which has produced thousands of openly shared web sites and blogs from students and faculty across the University.

Cover art for Gettin' Air

We definitely need another hour or two of this interview with John. I like the idea behind some of the highlighting work they’re doing with OU Create and their weekly updates. We need more of this in the Domains space. I wonder if they’ve experimented with a Homebrew Website Club sort of experience in their Domains practice?

Terry definitely has mentioned show notes with links, but I’m beginning to wonder if I should be following a different feed because I’m not seeing any of the great links I was hoping for recently from these episodes?

Replied to In the year of our blog 2019 by Clint LalondeClint Lalonde (EdTech Factotum)
Thought I would join in the year end fun with Tannis, Martin, Tony and others and put together a year end review kinda blog post. Funny. I’ve been blogging about edtech since 2007, and I don&…

Most of the convo, if any, seems to happen on the socials vs comments left on the blog these days. ❧

The sad part of this is how painfully limiting the conversation can be on social with the character limitations and too many issues with branching conversations and following all the context.
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 12:51PM

By the numbers ❧

I’m curious what things would look like if you similarly did an analysis of Twitter, Facebook, etc.? Where are you putting more time? What’s giving you the most benefit? Where are you getting value and how are you giving it back?
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:01PM

I still find blogging one of the most professionally satisfying things I do. It is a powerful thing to feel like you have a voice. ❧

–Highlighted December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM

2020 will also bring a more concerted effort on my part to both amplify the women in my network who blog, and both comment and refer back to their blogs. To use what they write as a starting off point for my own posts more. ❧

–Highlighted December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM

And I am planning on cutting back on my personal use of social media (easier said than done) and want to try to return to using my blog more than Twitter for sharing. ❧

certainly a laudable goal!

It helped me a lot to simply delete most of the social media apps off of my phone. I scribbled a bit about the beginning of the process back in November and there’s a link there to a post by Ben doing the same thing on his own website.

More people are leaving social feeds for RSS feeds lately. I’ve recently started following Jeremy Felt who is taking this same sort of journey himself. See: https://jeremyfelt.com/tag/people-still-blog/

Kudos as well to making the jump here:

In part, it’s what prompted me to visit your site to write a comment. (Sorry for upping your cis-gendered white male count, but 2019 was a bad year, and hopefully we can all make 2020 better as you’ve indicated.)
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM

Replied to Starting an IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club by Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)
Starting things is fun. Narrating things as you go is… funner. Just about a month ago I joined the IndieWeb chat via Slack, which is connected to IRC and a web chat as well. I haven’t actually participated, but I’ve been getting the feel of conversations and checking out a bunch of the materia...
Congrats this is awesome!
Even doing the cutting/pasting from the wiki page to set up an event can sometimes be harrowing, so kudos for sticking with that part.

The part I got hung up on the most here was actually adding my name in the RSVP. The code seemed to suggest that adding would work, but it kept showing me “Template:Jeremyfelt.com” instead. I then poked around and saw that others had redirects setup, so I created a page titled “jeremyfelt” and added a wiki redirect to my user page and changed the code to , but it then said “Template:jeremyfelt” and I knew I was going nowhere. Finally, I updated it with standard URL syntax: [[jeremyfelt|Jeremy Felt]] and my name appeared as expected. No cool picture next to it or anything, but I’ll figure that at some point. This is all wiki stuff I probably used to know but have completely forgotten. ❧

Some of this is relatively arcane and custom templated MediaWiki business. Here’s a link that explains most of it: https://indieweb.org/wikifying#How_to_Join_the_IndieWeb_Wiki

Feel free to hop into the helpful chat and most are ready and happy to try to help you out when you get stuck or provide pointers.
— Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:31PM

Read Imagining the #IndieWeb Version of WikiTribune by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)
Like many I joined WikiTribune, the new social network for news. The service quickly overtook Aacademia.edu as the primary spam engine of my inbox. Got me thinking that  Nuzzel, an app that algorithimically surfaces stuff to read by what your followers share on Twitter, already ads a layer of trust...
Watched The PBS NewsHour/POLITICO Democratic Debate from YouTube

Looking for the debate's start? Jump to 4:29:38.

The PBS NewsHour and POLITICO are hosting the sixth Democratic debate on Thursday, Dec. 19, 2019, from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. The debate will feature Andrew Yang, former Vice President Joe Biden, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Live stream schedule:
3:00 p.m. ET/Noon PT
Join us for a look at the last few months of the race to the 2020 nomination.

7:30 p.m. ET/4:30 p.m. PT
Our special pre-show begins hosted by PBS NewsHour's Lisa Desjardins.

8:00 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT
The debate begins.

Started watching about 30 minutes into the debate, but the presentation circled around and played it all again.
Watched "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan" Persona Non Grata from Amazon Prime
Directed by Dennie Gordon. With John Krasinski, Wendell Pierce, Noomi Rapace, Jordi Mollà. Reyes accuses the U.S. of tampering with the election. The U.S. Embassy is evacuated. Jack, Greer and Mike November must decide whether to follow orders or go off the grid. Reyes' men pursue Matice and the American soldiers in the jungle. Cover art for Amazon Prime's second season of Jack Ryan featuring the title character with a war-torn scene of destruction behind him.
Read Read Trump’s Letter to Pelosi Protesting Impeachment (New York Times)
President Trump sent a letter on Tuesday to Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressing his “most powerful protest” against the impeachment process. The House is expected to vote on two articles of impeachment against Mr. Trump on Wednesday.
An interesting UI presentation for highlights and annotations on the web. There is no click/interactivity within it however.

In general I don’t think for a moment that he actually wrote any of this. I suspect some of it was dictated or pulled from prior communication/thoughts. It definitely sounds like his “voice”, but I can’t imagine that it came from him in the same psuedo-logical structure, which I highly suspect was imposed on it after-the-fact by someone else.

! ❧

He really used 8 exclamation marks in a six page letter?! Has any president used this many in an entire term I wonder?
–December 20, 2019 at 09:00AM

Impeachment Fever ❧

There are several instances in this document where words are improperly capitalized, presumably in an attempt to make them stand out and make them more memorable. Or possibly to provide them more emphasis than they deserve.
–December 20, 2019 at 09:17AM

American People ❧

Here’s another case of the mis-capitalization. American should be capitalized, but people should not.
–December 20, 2019 at 09:18AM

Liked Youtube Chanukah playlist by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)

Chanukah is upon us next week, and I’ve added to my Youtube Chanukah playlist, which complements my digital music collection of Chanukah songs. It includes some fun ones from Acapella groups that do an annual Chanukah song. I have over 150 tracks otherwise…and may pick up more ideas… Sirius XM’s Radio Hanukkah launches December 20th to 31st on Channel 788. Chanukah is an 8 night holiday, gets 11 days of music. Christmas gets 11 Sirius channels that begin November 1st…Clearly we need more Chanukah songs…they are running out.

I only know of two Sirius channels, so apparently I’m missing out on the Christmas craziness. Do they have channels for every genre of music? And if so, what are the genres of Chanukah? With any luck, one of them is all Klezmer all the time…
Liked A new decade by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
As arbitrary as they are, these transitions provide a kind of useful punctuation - a spot to stop and breathe. For me, I think it might be useful to reflect on where I was at the start of the previous decade, where I am now, and where I'd like to be ten years from now.Ten years ago I lived in Oxford...
Liked The morning after by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
So, that's it, then. My prediction is that Brexit will happen as planned in 2020, and that later in the year, unless the progressive movement achieves the impossible, Donald Trump will be re-elected as President. If you work for a company like Facebook, this is on you. If you could have voted but di...