In a Friday edition of her White House briefing, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany declared that children's activities are being policed as a result of "cancel culture."
“At the end of each chapter write a few bullet points that summarize what you’ve read and make it personal if you can — that is, apply it to something in your life. Also, note any unanswered questions. When you’re done the book, put it down for a week.”
“Pick up the book again and go through all your notes. Most of these will be garbage but there will be lots you want to remember. Write the good stuff on the inside cover of the book along with a page number.”
“(Optional) Copy out the excerpts by hand or take a picture of them to pop into Evernote. Tag accordingly.”
“Inviting people to laugh with you while you are laughing at yourself is a good thing to do. You may be a fool but you’re the fool in charge.” ❧
Honestly, if a real platform existed where I could just communicate with my friends, make new friends, and read blogs by real people with no corporations or ads, I would love to be a part of that. I just don't even know if it's possible anymore. I don't know if any centralized platform can do that in 2020. Fortunately, we have our decentralized websites, and we can connect with each other this way. ❧
Kevin Marks (epeus.blogspot.com)Bob Garfield's de haut en bas attack on web commenters upset two very skilled conversational catalysts, Ira Glass, and Derek Powazek. The false dichotomy of 'we choose who you get to hear' and 'total anarchic mob noise' was dismissed by Jack Lail too. At the same time, Ben Laurie explained how the IETF's open-to-all mailing lists can be hijacked by time-rich fools, talking about the Open Web Foundation.
Of the group, Kevin, as usual, provides some of the best analysis, but he also adds in a huge amount of additional context by way of links.
Society seems to have ripped itself open recently and I can’t help but think that we’re going to need some strong tummelers and heavy work to allow everyone to speak, be heard, and create some change. Kevin’s piece here may be a good starting point.
Perhaps this is the piece some of our mainstream media have been missing from a journalistic perspective? For too long they’ve acted as aggregators and filters, but perhaps they should be spending a larger portion of their time doing some tummeling work on our behalf?
wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'footer-menu' ) ); ❧
header.php section.
dwhly (Hypothesis)The lessons of Twitter and Facebook, other Internet-scale basic service layers that most of us use, are instructive here. After the honeymoon period is over, and disruptive returns need to be generated to pay off limited partners or satisfy public shareholders, the tensions that these monetization efforts create ultimately seem to separate the motivations of management from those of users and the broader ecosystem. How will Rap Genius–and Marc Andreessen–navigate these questions? ❧
John Naughton (Memex 1.1)Interestingly, I’ve found that Kindle is useful in this respect. I buy Kindle versions of books that I need for work, and highlight passages and bookmark pages as I go. And when I’ve finished the software obligingly has a collection of all the passages I’ve highlighted. ❧
I often pull my own annotations to my personal website similar to your own Memex and publish them there (example: https://boffosocko.com/kind/annotation/)
Incidentally you can also annotate documents stored locally on your computer, but viewed through a browser as well as collaboratively annotating with others.
The challenge of flexibility.
It’s important to note that the goal of HyFlex is two make both the online and in-person experiences equal. ❧
There are some pieces of this that immediately make me think that this model is more of a sort of “separate, but equal” sort of modality. Significant resources will need to go toward the equality piece and even then it is likely to fall short from a social perspective.
Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 01:27PM
Finally, the best HyFlex classrooms have someone assisting the faculty member. ❧
This is the understatement of the year. Faculty members will require extensive training and LOTS of assistance. This assistance SHOULD NOT come from student assistants, graduate students (who are likely to be heavily undertrained), or other “free” sources.
Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 01:35PM
These assistants could also be work-study students who are assigned a particular classroom (or digital space) or they might be volunteers from class who are given credit for assisting in the delivery of the course. ❧
And of course, the first pivot (even in the same paragraph!) is exactly to these “free” or cheap sources which are likely to be overlooked and undertrained.
If a school is going to do this they need to take it seriously and actually give it professional resources.
Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 01:38PM
Incidentally there is some pre-existing research about the measurable fairness of court proceedings being held online that would tend to negate the equality that might be dispensed in online courseware.
See https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/are-online-courts-less-fair-on-the-media for some references. ❧
Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 02:42PM
This fall needs to be different. We need to ask students to be part of the solution of keeping learning flourishing in the fall. This includes asking them to help manage the class if it has a virtual component. ❧
This is moving education in exactly the WRONG direction. Students are already ill-prepared to do the actual work and studying of education, now we’re going to try to extract extra efficiency out of the system by asking them to essential teach themselves on top of it? This statement seems like the kind of thing a technology CEO would pitch higher education on as a means of monetizing something over which they had no control solely to extract value for their own company.
If we’re going to go this far, why not just re-institute slavery?
Annotated on May 21, 2020 at 02:46PM
For someone to call this the John Place method totally demeans the idea of the art of memory.
Annotated on May 20, 2020 at 11:08AM
From time to time academic journals undergo an interesting process of fission. Typically as a result of some serious dissatisfaction, the editorial board resigns en masse to set up a new journal, t…
there’s nothing like knowing that you’re going to have to justify your decision to a bunch of mathematicians. ❧
Annotated on May 20, 2020 at 10:05AM
Commonplace books are personal knowledge libraries; notebooks full of collected ideas and bits of wisdom all mixed up together. Here, we take a look at their history and benefits.
There is an old saying that the truest form of poverty is “when you have occasion for anything, you can’t use it...
Early compilations involved various combinations of four crucial operations: storing, sorting, selecting, and summarizing, which I think of as the four S’s of text management. We too store, sort, select, and summarize information, but now we rely not only on human memory, manuscript, and print, as in earlier centuries, but also on computer chips, search functions, data mining, and Wikipedia, along with other electronic techniques. ❧
Annotated on May 19, 2020 at 10:38PM
“In his influential De Copia (1512),” writes Professor Richard Yeo, “Erasmus advised that an abundant stock of quotations and maxims from classical texts be entered under various loci (places) to assist free-flowing oratory.”
Arranged under ‘Heads’ and recorded as ‘common-places’ (loci communes), these commonplace books could be consulted for speeches and written compositions designed for various situations — in the law court, at ceremonial occasions, or in the dedication of a book to a patron. Typical headings included the classical topics of honour, virtue, beauty, friendship, and Christian ones such as God, Creation, faith, hope, or the names of the virtues and vices. ❧
Annotated on May 19, 2020 at 10:51PM
Commonplace books, during the Renaissance, were used to enhance the memory. Yeo writes,
This reflected the ancient Greek and Roman heritage. In his Topica, Aristotle formulated a doctrine of ‘places’ (topoi or loci) that incorporated his ten categories. A link was soon drawn between this doctrine of ‘places’ (which were, for Aristotle, ‘seats of arguments’, not quotations from authors) and the art of memory. Cicero built on this in De Oratore, explaining that ‘it is chiefly order that gives distinctness to memory’; and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria became an influential formulation. This stress on order and sequence was the crux of what came to be known as ‘topical memory’, cultivated by mnemonic techniques (‘memoria technica’) involving the association of ideas with visual images. These ideas, forms of argument, or literary tropes were ‘placed’ in the memory, conceived in spatial terms as a building, a beehive, or a set of pigeon holes. This imagined space was then searched for the images and ideas it contained…. In the ancient world, the practical application of this art was training in oratory; yet Cicero stressed that the good orator needed knowledge, not just rhetorical skill, so that memory had to be trained to store and retrieve illustrations and arguments of various kinds. Although Erasmus distrusted the mnemonic arts, like all the leading Renaissance humanists, he advocated the keeping of commonplace books as an aid to memory. ❧
I particularly love the way this highlights the phrase “‘placed’ in the memory” because the idea of loci as a place has been around so long that we tacitly use it as a verb so naturally in conjunction with memory!
Note here how the author Richard Yeo manages not to use the phrase memory palace or method of loci.Was this on purpose?
Annotated on May 19, 2020 at 10:56PM
While calling memory “the store-house of our ideas,” John Locke recognized its limitations.
On the one hand, it was an incredible source of knowledge.
On the other hand, it was weak and fragile. He knew that over time, memory faded and became harder to retrieve, which made it less valuable. ❧
As most humanists of the time may have had incredibly well-trained memories (particularly in comparison with the general loss of the art now), this is particularly interesting to me. Having had a great memory, the real value of these writings and materials is to help their memories dramatically outlive their own lifetimes. This is particularly useful as their systems of passing down ideas via memory was dramatically different than those of indigenous peoples who had a much more institutionalized version of memory methods and passing along their knowledge.
Annotated on May 19, 2020 at 11:00PM
“Extraordinary Commonplaces,” Robert Darnton ❧
Annotated on May 19, 2020 at 11:03PM
Neither ought anything to be collected whilst you are busied in reading; if by taking the pen in hand the thread of your reading be broken off, for that will make the reading both tedious and unpleasant. ❧
This is incredibly important for me, though in a more technology friendly age, I’ve got tools like Hypothes.is for quickly highlighting and annotating pages and can then later collect them into my commonplace book as notes to work with and manage after-the-fact.
Annotated on May 19, 2020 at 11:07PM
The aim of these books wasn’t regurgitation but rather combinatorial creativity. People were encouraged to improvise on themes and topics. Gathering raw material alone — in this case, information — is not enough. We must transform it into something new. It is in this light that Seneca advised copying the bee and Einstein advised combinatorial play. ❧
I was really hoping for so much more in this essay on the combinatorial creativity, espcially since the author threw the idea into the title. The real meat must be in the two linked articles about Seneca and Einstein.
There is a slight mention of combinatorics in the justaposition of pieces within one’s commonplace book, and a mention that these books may date back to the 12th century where they were probably more influenced by the combinatoric creativity of Raymond Lull. It’s still an open question for me just how far back the idea of commonplaces goes as well as how far back Lull’s combinatoric pieces go…
Annotated on May 19, 2020 at 11:13PM
Hello. Bit of a mixed bag this time, so let’s start with possibly the most useful news of the past two weeks: New test could guarantee the perfect avocado. No...
the Wholesome Meat Act (I kid you not) of 1967 creates three parallel meat streams depending on the inspection in place at the slaughterhouse. Giant meat packers, who have full USDA inspection, can sell their products (and any ancillary pathogens) anywhere in the country. Smaller state-inspected facilities can sell only within their home state. And the smallest slaughterhouses can sell only to people who bought a share in the animal while it was still alive. Meat inspection is a cracking example of the capture of regulatory authority by the largest players, and it is by no means unique to the US. And according the The Counter, the bigger processing plants are getting more favourable treatment even during the Covid-19 emergency. ❧
Annotated on May 19, 2020 at 09:49AM
it supports students and teachers and schools in managing their own infrastructure, their own labor, their own data.
—Audrey Watters
Ok, so is hypothes.is doing this? How can it?
- my annotations must be better accessible/organizable --the current "My Annotations" is not enough
- annotation must be exportable
—jeremydean on Dec 30, 2015
And ultimately, you need to be able to completely run your own annotation infrastructure, but create and access it through a universal client.
—dwhly on
Sure. Less clear to me how that looks/works and what that I do today online is similar in "ownership." But does your "you" refer to students or teachers or schools or all of the above?
The first two (I list) seem key in terms of practical adherence to these principles for everyday users.
—jeremydean on
It's similar in character to the Domain of One's Own initiative. From a long term perspective, you might be better off taking ownership of your own infrastructure, that you can carry with you and guarantee will be available over long time periods (decades to centuries). Hypothes.is should at the very least permit you to do so if you prefer-- regardless of whether we continue to provide an annotation service at scale (which I very much think we should).
Your question around "you" is an important one. I might for instance, set up my own annotation server for my personal notes-- with the confidence that I'll always be able to find a reliable hosting provider for those. Similar to how I have my own web domain, and I host it at one place now, but I can always move it if that location goes out of business-- and my website will be identical to its current form in the new place. In the same way, my current personal email is through an address at my own domain. I don't need to depend on gmail being around forever.
As a teacher, I might use a more common service provider (like Hypothes.is) for class lessons-- one that my students are already likely to have accounts on. As web travelers, we're really accustomed to browsing seamlessly between servers-- it's understood to be the essential architecture of the web. Bringing it to the world of annotations has extraordinary benefits (IMHO) and will serve to foster more adoption and more diversity of applications.
—dwhly on
Some of what I’ve been looking at relates back to the renaissance ideas of the commonplace book as well as memory techniques dating back to ancient Greece and even further back. There are ideas like wikis (personal as well as public–Audrey references a great post by Mike Caulfield in her article) and online notebooks tools like Evernote, OneNote, TiddlyWiki, Roam Research, etc. If a student could quickly add all their highlights/annotations into their website, online notebook, Zettelkasten, or other related learning tools, then they could use them for reading, reviewing, or even spaced repetition as provided by platforms like Anki, Mnemosyne, or NeuraCache.
Going back to Jeremy’s original question though:
Ok, so is hypothes.is doing this? How can it?
Hypothesis could immediate do this and quite effectively if it supported the W3C recommended Micropub spec. In short, it’s a standard and open source method for publishing data to a broad spectrum of surfaces so that developers don’t need to build custom solutions for each of thousands of snowflake platforms.
That is, in addition to its current functionality, you could add some code to make Hypothesis a Micropub client!
The quickest and most flexible approach I might suggest would be to allow users to publish their annotations/highlights not only to their accounts, but have UI to trigger a micropub request to their website, online notebook, or other platform.
There’s nothing more I’d want than an easy way to own all the data I’m collecting with Hypothesis and Micropub could quickly add it for a wide variety of set ups and systems. There are already implementations of Micropub servers for a variety of CMS software including WordPress, Drupal, Known, Craft, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, Blot, and Micro.blog with others being added, including Grav. Some of us are actively working on adding it to Wiki-related software as well. Since large portions of the Domain of One’s Own movement are built on these handful, you’d have some pretty quick coverage of not only all this space but even more.
I suspect your dev team could build an implementation in just a few days and it would open up a huge advantage for allowing users to more easily own their H related data on their own websites or in other online locations (while still utilizing the Hypothesis platform for more complex functionality).
There’s some solid documentation and a wealth of open source clients you could look at or borrow code from as well as a test suite. I suspect the IndieWeb Dev chat channel would surface a few additional developers to answer questions about any other issues as they crop up.
If you’d like a quick 5-10 minute demo of how this works for a handful of other clients in conjunction with something like WordPress, I’m happy to volunteer the time and spitball some potential ways Hypothesis could dovetail it and leverage its power.
Audrey Watters (Hack Education)This is the ninth article in my series Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015
And this resistance is happening… ❧
This link (on resistance) rotted, but can be found at https://web.archive.org/web/20160305223237/http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2015/09/09/adios-ed-tech-hola-something-else/
Annotated on May 16, 2020 at 11:49AM
Here’s what I wrote last year when I chose “the Indie Web” as one of the “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2014”: ❧
I want to go back and read this too.
Annotated on May 16, 2020 at 12:06PM
The Indie Web posits itself as an alternative to the corporate Web, but it is a powerful alternative to much of ed-tech as well, which as this series has once again highlighted, is quite committed to controlling and monetizing students’ and teachers’ connections, content, and data. ❧
Annotated on May 16, 2020 at 12:08PM
I mean, what does an alternative to ed-tech as data-extraction, control, surveillance, privatization, and profiteering look like? What does resistance to the buzzwords and the bullshit look like? I don’t have an answer. (There isn’t an answer.) But I think we can see a glimmer of possibility in the Indie Web Movement. It’s enough of a glimmer that I’m calling it a trend. ❧
For Audrey Watters (the self-described Cassandra of EdTech) to indicate even a glimmer of hope is rare! This ranks as a glowing recommendation as a result.
Annotated on May 16, 2020 at 12:08PM
