Media Redefined: interest mixes for curious minds. media + tech + pop
I’ve always wished that they had an RSS feed for this site. Fortunately Kevin Smokler has put one together that should do the trick: https://feedity.com/redef-com/UlNbUFpTVg.rss
Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
John Evdemon (Loosely Coupled Thinking)I love Known - it's an elegant blogging tool that supports most Indieweb standards right out of the box. The biggest challenge I've had with Known is getting it upgraded. I host my blog with Reclaim - a great little hosting service with excellent customer support.
Some useful advice for updating Known when I get around to it. I feel like the technical hurdle for maintaining it has increased with the addition of needing bits like Composer.
The Dominic system is a mnemonic system used to remember sequences of digits similar to the mnemonic major system. It was invented and used in competition by eight-time World Memory Champion Dominic O'Brien.
Japanese wordplay relies on the nuances of the Japanese language and Japanese script for humorous effect. Japanese double entendres have a rich history in Japanese entertainment, because of the way that Japanese words can be read to have several different meanings and pronunciations (homographs). Also, several different spellings for any pronunciation and wildly differing meanings (homophones). Often replacing one spelling with another (homonyms) can give a new meaning to phrases.
I hardly know where to begin. This newsletter’s already a day late — partially because of travel, partially because I have no idea how to address some of the things that have occurred in and around the ed-tech industry (and ed-tech punditry) this week.
There are always lessons to be learned.
I’m committed to playing the long game of learning, rather than the short game of schooling. ❧
–December 10, 2019 at 06:55AM
📗 Started reading An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris
Jim Luke (EconProph)Herein, against my better judgement, I wade into the Great Instructure social media wars of 2019. Last week, Instructure Inc., the publicly traded (NYSE: INST) company announced it had agreed to go private and sell itself to private equity firm Thoma Bravo. For people who teach in higher education this is big news. Instructure, is the current name for the company founded in 2008 that created and sells the Canvas LMS. Canvas in the last decade has toppled the previous king-of-the-LMS’s, Blackboard. Canvas is now widely reported to have largest market share of higher ed LMS market at least in North America. Moodle, the open source system, appears to dominate outside North America.
Capitalists and market-thinkers inevitably seek to enclose the commons, privatizing benefits and externalizing costs onto society.❧
It’s nice to see this reminder every now and then.
–highlighted December 09, 2019 at 09:00PM
Some pragmatic and solid analysis here. Better than some of the FUD I’ve seen bandied about.
Microsoft has for years promised it would eventually shut down to-do list app Wunderlist, which it acquired in 2015, in favor of its own app, To Do — after it felt the latter was able to offer a competitive experience that included Wunderlist’s best features. Today, Microsoft is finally…
The company had "totally failed as a business," the CEO said in an email.
This is deplorable behavior. Paying users shouldn’t have to foot the bill. It should be the financial responsibility of the company, its board, and its executives to do better than this. Startups shouldn’t structure their company like a Ponzi scheme and doing so sets a terrible precedent.
Desmond Rivet (Desmond Rivet)In which I discover that I'm retro, not passé #indieweb
Jemima Kiss from the GuardianKevin Marks, Google's developer advocate for Open Social, talked today about the unpredictable, organic growth of social networks
Jemima Kiss interviews Kevin about Open Social at FOWA. Thu 9 Oct 2008 15.50 EDT
Kevin Marks, Google's developer advocate for Open Social, talked today about the unpredictable, organic growth of social networks. Even the biggest networks have seen their audience bases grow exponentially in unexpected communities; this is partly because of the dynamics of relationships between people, who mostly want to connect - or feel most comfortable connecting to people like themselves.
Despite some derogatory write-ups of Google's Orkut social network in the US press - "it's not a proper social network and is full of Brazilian prostitutes" - it's a perfect example of a social networking site with a strong community in one language. A community tends to mould the site to its own culture, which makes it less appealing for other languages and cultures. Clearly those with a strong English-language audience have a big advantage, despite the cultural differences of the Anglo-speaking world.
I asked Marks to explain a bit more about trends in social networking and how Open Social is trying to both facilitate growth, and respond to change. Open Social doesn't have a three-year road map, but is constantly adjusting its templates around the mapping of social information.
Some interesting philosophy of social networks from 2008 that’s still broadly applicable today. This sort of design thinking is something that IndieWeb as a service platforms like Micro.blog, WithKnown, WordPress, and others will want to keep in mind as they build.
People tend to be members of more than one network for a reason.
Originally bookmarked on December 06, 2019 at 09:00PM