A WordPress Conference about education on Twitter
Category: Education
👓 The Vulnerability of Learning | Desert of My Real Life
Listening to the students talk about feeling unsure and vulnerable when they first encountered open educational practices made me think about my own learning. As a mid-career academic who has changed jobs and even disciplines, I am a confident learner. I have received lots of praise and other kinds of positive reinforcement for my ability to learn new things. If you have read previous posts on my blog, you might know that I am really interested in developments in the IndieWeb movement and am trying to write about some of my experiences with using IndieWeb tools to build my own web site. I’ve been building my own sites for years and so I have a lot of confidence in my ability there as well. Working on the IndieWeb stuff has been challenging because there’s a lot of new language and new concepts as well as some aspects of web development that I have not engaged with before. I often feel vulnerable when I write my posts about the IndieWeb because my understanding of how everything works is emerging. In other words, I don’t get it all yet but I’m still writing publicly about my work.
Reply to Aaron Davis
Throw it into a feed reader like Inoreader that will let you import or subscribe to OPML lists and then come back to thank him all over again.
👓 High demand from retirees to live on campus at Arizona State University I InsideHigherEd
A sold-out housing complex for senior citizens on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus sparks a conversation about whether universities are doing enough to engage with older people.
👓 Everything Old is New Again: Adventures in the IndieWeb | Desert of My Real Life
The tougher part is that some of your post seems a bit misleading to me.
The couple of microformats related lines you’re adding in your child theme like add_theme_support( ‘microformats2’ );
are in fact declaring that your theme properly supports microformats v1, v2, and microdata which it doesn’t quite. Those lines don’t actually add support (as the hook might indicate), but tell other WordPress plugins that your theme is microformats compatible which may prevent them from adding particular pieces of redundant microformats related code.
While you’ve got an h-entry
in your header file, you’re closing the related </div>
just after the title so that if the body of your post includes a p-summary
or an e-content
microformat, parsers are likely to have problems. Instead you might want to do something similar in either your content.php
(or other file that adds the body of your post) or your footer.php
files where you close that div
in one of those two files instead of in your header.php
file. If you need it the article page on the wiki has a simple example of what the final result should look like.
My favorite template for how to add microformats to a WordPress theme is David Shanske’s fork of the TwentySixteen theme. Because of GitHub’s interface and the fact that he made changes in relatively small increments, you can look at the history of his changes (start with the oldest ones and move forward) and see the highlights of what he added and removed in individual files to effect the necessary changes. (He made some other drastic changes like removing Post Formats in preference to Post Kinds as well as some other non-microformats changes, so you’ll necessarily want to skip those particular changes.) I think I learned more about WordPress Themes by going through this one example a change at a time than any of the books or tutorials I’ve ever seen.
Another tool in addition to indiewebify.me is the Pin13 parser which will parse your page and give you some indication about what it is finding (or not) and how things are being nested (or not).
If you need some help, feel free to catch one of the WordPress folks in the IndieWeb chat. I suspect that since you’ve got the fortitude to dive into the code the way you have, that you’ll be able to puzzle it out.
👓 AI Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat | WIRED
Teachers are being forced to adapt to new tools that execute homework perfectly.
There is some interesting discussion in here on how digital technology meets pedagogy. We definitely need to think about how we reframe what is happening here. I’m a bit surprised they didn’t look back at the history of the acceptance (or not) of the calculator in math classes from the 60’s onward.
Where it comes to math, some of these tools can be quite useful, but students need to have the correct and incorrect uses of these technologies explained and modeled for them. Rote cheating certainly isn’t going to help them, but if used as a general tutorial of how and why methods work, then it can be invaluable and allow them to jump much further ahead of where they might otherwise be.
I’m reminded of having told many in the past that the general concepts behind the subject of calculus are actually quite simple and relatively easy to master. The typical issue is that students in these classes may be able to do the first step of the problem which is the actual calculus, but get hung up on not having practiced the algebra enough and the 10 steps of algebra after the first step of calculus is where their stumbling block lies in getting the correct answer.
Reply to Bill Ferriter on Something Weird is Happening on Twitter Right Now.
I far prefer
to communicate back and forth:Even better Bill is if we had such conversations from the comfort of our own backyard using bridgy and webmenbtions, rather than someone else’s playground?
So I’ll post my reply to you on my own website and manually copy it across to yours and (begrudgingly) syndicate a copy into Twitter, so everyone can play along. I’m hoping that the ability to automate these sorts of conversations from site to site will improve them all around in the coming year.
👓 Something Weird is Happening on Twitter Right Now. | THE TEMPERED RADICAL
Guys. Check it out in the stream of comments that follow this Dean Shareski tweet: I’m suspect of educators whose entire feed is a cacophony…
📺 The Pension Gamble | Watch S37 E3 | FRONTLINE | PBS
SEASON 37: EPISODE 3
FRONTLINE investigates the role of state governments and Wall Street in driving America’s public pensions into a multi-trillion-dollar hole. Marcela Gaviria, Martin Smith, and Nick Verbitsky go inside the volatile fight over pensions playing out in Kentucky, and examine the broader consequences for teachers, police, firefighters and other public employees everywhere.
👓 Do Scholastic Book Fairs Live Up to the Nostalgia? | The Atlantic
Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.
👓 A College Student Was Told To Remove A "Fuck Nazis" Sign Because It Wasn't "Inclusive" | BuzzFeed News
"This email tells me the university cares more about the feelings of Nazis than the safety of their students."
👓 Hypothesis Launches App to Bring Annotation to Learning Management Systems | Hypothes.is
We are excited to announce the official launch of the Hypothesis LMS app. Thanks to the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, Hypothesis now integrates with all major LTI-compliant Learning Management Systems, including Instructure Canvas, Blackboard Learn, D2L Brightspace, Moodle, and Sakai. We will be testing other platforms, including MOOC-providers like Coursera and edX in the coming weeks and months.
With this release, Hypothesis is better prepared to support the strong adoption we already see in teaching and learning. Students and teachers are a majority of the nearly 200 thousand annotators who have created over 4.3 million annotations using Hypothesis. The new LMS integration means teachers can bring collaborative annotation in their classrooms seamlessly as a part of their normal workflow.
🎧 Episode 025 System Theories, Racism & Human Relationships: Interview with TK Coleman | Human Current
In this episode, Haley interviews TK Coleman to discuss how humans allow their conflicting mental models to influence the way they handle controversial topics like racism. TK also shares how understanding context and patterns within human systems ultimately empowers us to actively contribute to human progress.
Also glad to have the recommendation of General Systems Theory: Beginning With Wholes by Barbara G. Hanson as a more accessible text in comparison to Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s text. The gang at Human Current should set up an Amazon Affiliate link so that when I buy books they recommend (which happens frequently), it helps to support and underwrite their work.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
Reality is objective, but meaning is contextual.
—Barbara Hanson, General Systems Theory: Beginning with Wholes quoted within the episode
🔖 The influence of collaboration networks on programming language acquisition by Sanjay Guruprasad | MIT
Many behaviors spread through social contact. However, different behaviors seem to require different degrees of social reinforcement to spread within a network. Some behaviors spread via simple contagion, where a single contact with an "activated node" is sufficient for transmission, while others require complex contagion, with reinforcement from multiple nodes to adopt the behavior. But why do some behaviors require more social reinforcement to spread than others? Here we hypothesize that learning more difficult behaviors requires more social reinforcement. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the programming language adoption of hundreds of thousands of programmers on the social coding platform Github. We show that adopting more difficult programming languages requires more reinforcement from the collaboration network. This research sheds light on the role of collaboration networks in programming language acquisition.
Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 26-28).
Advisor: César Hidalgo.
I think there might be some interesting takeaways for people looking at collective learning and online pedagogies as well as for communities like the IndieWeb which are trying to not only build new technologies, but help to get them into others’ hands by teaching and disseminating some generally tough technical knowledge. (In this respect, the referenced Human Current podcast episode may be a worthwhile overview.)
👓 @MozOpenLeaders – Building a Healthier Internet | fiveflames4learning.com
I didn’t think I was that important. I’m just one small part of one small space in one small corner of the world. I never realized the work I do was helping to build a healthier interne…