Month: December 2022

🎧Episode 539: Frustrated On Your Behalf | Core Intuition

Listened to Episode 539: Frustrated On Your Behalf by Manton Reece and Daniel Jalkut from Core Intuition

Manton and Daniel talk about payments from the Small App Developer settlement against Apple. Why does Manton refuse to accept free money, and are there valid reasons to opt out of the settlement? Then they reflect on the wave of opportunity from Twitter’s drastic downfall, and whether Manton and Daniel can “catch it”. Finally, Manton remembers the IndieWeb principles about plurality and monoculture, and they discuss how that might relate to Mastodon.

Replied to Microblogging with Mastodon: Posting Automatically to My WordPress Site by Dr. Scott SchopierayDr. Scott Schopieray (schopie1.commons.msu.edu)
When the Humanities Commons team started to spin up hcommons.social I started to wonder if this platform would be a way to conduct my microblogging activities in a space that might have a better distribution network, allowing my work to be more visible.
OMG! There is so much to love here about these processes and to see people in the wild experimenting with them and figuring them out.

Scott (@schopie1), you are not alone! There are lots of us out here doing these things, not only with WordPress but a huge variety of other platforms. There are many ways to syndicate your content depending on where it starts its life.

In addition to Jim Groom and a huge group of others’ work within A Domain of One’s Own, there’s also a broader coalition of designers, developers, professionals, hobbyists, and people of all stripes working on these problems under the name of IndieWeb.

For some of their specific work you might appreciate the following:

Incidentally, I wrote this for our friend Kathleen Fitzpatrick last week and I can’t wait to see what she’s come up with over the weekend and in the coming weeks. Within the IndieWeb community you’ll find people like Ben Werdmuller who founded both WithKnown (aka Known) and Elgg and Aram Zucker-Scharff who helped to create PressForward.

I’m thrilled to see the work and huge strides that Humanities Commons is making to ensure some of these practices come to fruition.

If you’re game, perhaps we ought to plan an upcoming education-related popup event as an IndieWebCamp event to invite more people into this broader conversation?

If you have questions or need any help in these areas, I’m around, but so are hundreds of friends in the IndieWeb chat: https://chat.indieweb.org.

I hope we can bring more of these technologies to the masses in better and easier-to-use manners to lower the technical hurdles.

Replied to a post by Naida Saavedra @naidasaavedra@hcommons.socialNaida Saavedra @naidasaavedra@hcommons.social (hcommons.social)
Next semester I'll teach a #CreativeWriting class (fiction, in English) for the first time ever! I'm very excited! I'll focus on short stories and flash fiction. Any ideas you may have, texts you usually include, please send them my way! #LatinaProfessor #AcademicMastodon #WritingCommunity
@naidasaavedra, some ideas for perusal:

McPhee’s Draft No. 4 suggests a useful and fun writing exercise, but it’s missing the hidden contextual advice of using older dictionaries like Webster’s 1913 dictionary. 

Encouraging creative writers to keep and maintain a commonplace book is always a fruitful exercise. Most of the “greats” had one (or something close to it), but contemporary examples like Eminem’s may be more relevant/motivating. Blogger and creative writer Austin Kleon has a digital version as an example.  Colleen Kennedy has an excellent and creative class assignment relating to this as well.

Musician and producer Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt created a set of 100+ “creativity cards” which they entitled Oblique Strategies that can be useful to introduce to students and have them use over a semester. All the editions’ cards can be found via links here: http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/Edition1-3.html, but there are also websites, apps, and even printable cards. 

And finally, speaking of cards, it can be fun to do experimental creative writing using index cards, a practice used by Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Paul, Arno Schmidt, Michael Ende, and many others. Open Culture has a short piece on Nabokov’s process.

Should you care to mine it for other possible ideas, I’ve got a digital commonplace of my own. Here are some possible places to start:

References

McPhee, John. “Draft No. 4: Replacing the Words in Boxes.” The New Yorker, April 29, 2013. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4. 
 
Somers, James. “You’re Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary.” Blog. The Jsomers.Net Blog, May 18, 2014. https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary.
 
Kennedy, Colleen E. “Creating a Commonplace Book (CPB).” Accessed August 31, 2021. https://www.academia.edu/35101285/Creating_a_Commonplace_Book_CPB_.
 
Eno, Brian, and Peter Schmidt. Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas. 5th ed. 1975. Reprint, self-published, 2001. https://www.enoshop.co.uk/shop/oblique-strategies.
Replied to Stephen Ramsay (@sramsay@hcommons.social) by Stephen RamsayStephen Ramsay (hcommons.social)
I had this idea today about a conversation between Vladimir Nabokov and Paula Vogel, and how funny and interesting that would be. So I wrote some ideas about that in a notebook. #ClosedRI
Are you thinking maybe along the lines of Infinite Conversation? https://infiniteconversation.com/

I’m in for that…

Replied to a post by Ryan CordellRyan Cordell (hcommons.social)
I genuinely enjoy building standalone course websites, in part to more easily share teaching materials—see https://ryancordell.org/teaching/ for examples—& in part to maintain some ownership over my course materials. But increasingly I feel its in students’ better interest to just build in the university’s LMS, where they’re accessing their other classes—why should they enjoy juggling multiple systems any more than I do? And I don’t really want to build two sites for every class, so this spring I may just put all my courses in Canvas
I more than appreciate the extra work involved and affordances of the alternate, but I have to say a small piece of spirit in my soul died as I read this. sigh

I wonder if anyone is documenting the amount of course material that disappears and dies in LMSs the way that some track the loss of data and content when social media silos disappear? Our institutions need to do more to help us here.

Replied to a post by Ryan BarrettRyan Barrett (snarfed.org)
https://snarfed.org/instagram-atom-logo.png https://snarfed.org/instagram-atom-logo.png Re-launched instagram-atom, my side project that lets you read your Instagram feed in any feed reader, with new browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Feel free to try it out, feedback is welcome!
God bless you Ryan Barrett!

🎧 The Modern Golden Age Podcast Episode #16: Bryan Kam

Listened to The Modern Golden Age Podcast Episode #16: Bryan Kam by João Mateus from The Modern Golden Age Podcast

This week, I show you my conversation with Bryan, a philosopher, writer, and researcher. He's a very thoughtful individual, with a fascinating mind. We talked about his work, writing, music, and much more.

  • 00:00 ~ Introduction
  • 01:10 ~ Thomas Khun
  • 05:55 ~ Bryan's relationship with ideas
  • 11:02 ~ Note-taking
  • 17:20 ~ Health model of Inquiry
  • 20:41 ~ Bryan's current questions
  • 26:00 ~ Meditation
  • 33:00 ~ Change and Modern Golden Age
  • 42:15 ~ Speaking, writing and thinking
  • 50:43 ~ Original Sources and influences
  • 55:20 ~ Intellectual and creative Humility
  • 1:06:03 ~ Classical composers and jazz musicians
  • 1:08:30 ~ Types of writing
  • 1:10:00 ~ Practices in MGA
  • 1:18:00 ~ The kind of person that allows for an MGA
  • 1:21:00 ~ Values in a Modern Golden Age
  • 1:23:12 ~ Where can you find Bryan?
There’s some interesting space to explore with respect to music composing, creation, and playing with respect to jazz and “conversation” that relates to orality and literacy here, but they miss that piece broadly. The classical music portion was missing some context as much classical music is like certain forms of poetry which have highly structural elements within which one must stay while being expressive, while improvisational jazz is like free verse.

The “monastery” to “metropolis” discussion of the development and nurturing of an idea is an interesting analogy for pedagogy and learning as well as scaffolding. Having a supportive environment with trust is similar to most learning environments and particularly a difficult one for second language learners to find as the paradigm changes based on age.

I wish there had been more improvisation here with respect to the conversational portions, but instead the interviewer kept going back to a script of pre-formed questions instead of exploring the ideas as they came. I was surprised to see references to David Krakauer and Stefan Zweig pop up here.

Stefan Zweig (reference? his memoir?) apparently suggested that students translate authors as a means of becoming more intimately acquainted with their work. This is similar to restating an author in one’s own words as a means of improving one’s understanding. It’s a lower level of processing that osculates on the idea of having a conversation with a text.

Drinking game using the phrase: “I do believe.” 😅

Rating: 2 of 5; this was in my wheelhouse, but provided no real insight for me. Unlikely to listen to others in this series.

📚 Acquisition: Oranges by John McPhee

Acquired Oranges by John McPhee (Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux )
A classic of reportage, Oranges was first conceived as a short magazine article about oranges and orange juice, but the author kept encountering so much irresistible information that he eventually found that he had in fact written a book. It contains sketches of orange growers, orange botanists, orange pickers, orange packers, early settlers on Florida's Indian River, the first orange barons, modern concentrate makers, and a fascinating profile of Ben Hill Griffin of Frostproof, Florida who may be the last of the individual orange barons. McPhee's astonishing book has an almost narrative progression, is immensely readable, and is frequently amusing. Louis XIV hung tapestries of oranges in the halls of Versailles, because oranges and orange trees were the symbols of his nature and his reign. This book, in a sense, is a tapestry of oranges, too—with elements in it that range from the great orangeries of European monarchs to a custom of people in the modern Caribbean who split oranges and clean floors with them, one half in each hand.
Replied to a tweet by Aravind Balla (Twitter)
There are some fun collected experiments on this topic at https://indieweb.org/handwriting
MEMO

TO: app developers considering and other related apps and interfaces

Perhaps spend a day or two to add Micropub support to the platform first, then your app could potentially be used to publish to ANY website/platform that supports the W3C spec.

Replied to a post by Dr Hitchcock (@drh@hackers.town)Dr Hitchcock (@drh@hackers.town) (hackers.town)
What is the most simple and cheapest way to #selfhost your own #blog or #microblog? I’d really like something that fits in with the protocols used by the #IndieWeb massive. Also, something that is simple to post from a smartphone. Pleeeease
The Quick Start page at https://indieweb.org/Quick_Start has some inexpensive and user friendly options as well as some indication of their levels of IndieWeb friendliness. Beyond this, WordPress has a reasonably low self-host bar with lots of options depending on how much time you want to spend on the hosting/maintenance.
In addition to following people on Mastodon in your feed reader via , you can also follow hashtags which appear there. For example, to follow try: https://mastodon.social/tags/indieweb.rss. #FeedReaderFriday 

Keep in mind that the output of these feeds will be instance specific, and the tag feed will only get mentions from your instance and instances yours can “see” (or gets by follows with federation). So if you use a different instance, you may see more or less in your feeds. Because of its size and depth of federation, this makes mastodon.social a good bet for these sorts of subscriptions, but your experience may vary depending on your needs.