2022 | Chris Aldrich

One might think that instead of using Hugo (or previously Medium) that Mastodon’s blog would be on an ActivityPub-based platform likeWriteFreely. This seems like a missed opportunity for ActivityPub, but a bigger win for the (more) open web.

In addition to following people on Mastodon in your feed reader via #RSS, you can also follow hashtags which appear there. For example, to follow #IndieWeb 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.

#ConspiracyTheories: Jack Dorsey makes his first post (and a critical one) on Revue on 12/13, so Elon Musk shuts it down the following day? 🤔

MEMO

TO: app developers considering #Mastodon and other #ActivityPub 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. #OpenWeb #IndieWeb #FTW

🎧 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.

Replied to a post by

Ryan 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 #IndieWeb 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.