Annotation | Chris Aldrich

📑 The Vulnerability of Learning | Cathie LeBlanc

Replied to The Vulnerability of Learning by

Cathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)

When I received Chris’s comment, my first response was that I should delete my post or at least the incorrect part of it. It’s embarrassing to have your incorrect understandings available for public view. But I decided to leave the post as is but put in a disclaimer so that others would not be misled by my misunderstandings.
This experience reminded me that learning makes us vulnerable. Admitting that you don’t know something is hard and being corrected is even harder. Chris was incredibly gentle in his correction. It makes me think about how I respond to my students’ work. Am I as gentle with their work as Chris was to mine? Could I be more gentle? How often have I graded my students’ work and only focused on what they did wrong? Or forgotten that feeling of vulnerability when you don’t know something, when you put your work out for others to judge? This experience has also reminded me that it’s important that we as teachers regularly put ourselves into situations in which we authentically grapple with not knowing something. We should regularly share our less than fully formed understandings with others for feedback. It helps us remember that even confident learners can struggle with being vulnerable. And we need to keep in mind that many of our students are not confident learners. ❧

I’m reminded here of the broad idea that many bloggers write about sooner or later of their website being a “thought space” or place to contemplate out in the open. More often than not, even if they don’t have an audience to interact with, their writings become a way of thinking out loud, clarifying things for themselves, self-evolving, or putting themselves out there for potential public reactions (good, bad, or indifferent).

While writing things out loud to no audience can be helpful and useful on an individual level, it’s often even more helpful to have some sort of productive and constructive feedback. While a handful of likes or positive seeming responses can be useful, I always prefer the ones that make me think more broadly, deeply, or force me to consider other pieces I hadn’t envisioned before. To me this is the real value of these open and often very public thought spaces.

For those interested in the general idea, I’ve been [bookmarking/tagging things around the idea of thought spaces I’ve read on my own website](https://boffosocko.com/tag/thought-spaces/). Hopefully this collection helps others better understand the spectrum of these ideas for themselves.

With respect to the vulnerability piece, I’m reminded of an episode of The Human Current I listened to a few weeks back. There was an excellent section that touched on building up trust with students or even a class when it comes to providing feedback and criticism. Having a bank of trust makes it easier to give feedback as well as to receive it. Here’s a link to the audio portion and a copy of the relevant text.

📑 The Vulnerability of Learning | Cathie LeBlanc

Replied to The Vulnerability of Learning by

Cathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)

Chris was incredibly gentle in his correction. It makes me think about how I respond to my students’ work. Am I as gentle with their work as Chris was to mine? ❧

What a relief to hear this! The hardest part about writing my response was in possibly coming off too hard or painfully pedantic and not wanting to turn you off in your explorations.

📑 There are only three places that have a ‘the’ in the front of their name: the Vatican, The Hague, and the Bronx.

Annotated Just Kids from the Bronx by Arlene Alda (justkidsfromthebronx.com)

“There are only three places that have a ‘the’ in the front of their name: the Vatican, The Hague, and the Bronx.” ❧
—Mary Higgins Clark

📑 Blind Person-Tagging | Kicks Condor

Annotated Blind Person-Tagging by Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)

Unlinked mentions…? What if you had an individual who was the subject of the text, but you didn’t want to notify them? You may want to include an unlinked @boffosocko, to refer to someone without summoning them. But—what if you wanted to link readers to the person without notifying them? ❧

I thought about this case in the not-so-recent-past and came up with the possibility of creating a “submention” similar to the idea of a subtweet. If you scroll down on that particular post, you’ll see a response from Colin Walker about actually implementing it, which he implemented as a nomention plugin for WordPress.

Of course doing things this way doesn’t necessarily prevent the person from possibly seeing it through the natural course of events, others notifying them directly (snitch-tagging), or even the use of things like refbacks, which would send them notifications anyway. And then there’s Voldemorting…

📑 Bullet Journal: One Book to Rule Them All | Jamie Todd Rubin

Annotated Bullet Journal: One Book to Rule Them All by Jamie Todd Rubin (Jamie Todd Rubin)

Isaacson pointed out that more than 7,000 pages from Da Vinci’s notebooks survived to today–a stretch of 500 years. He asked how many of our tweets and Facebook posts will survive even 50 years. Paper, it turns out, is a durable medium of information storage. ❧

Of course one also needs to think about reach and distribution as well. His notebooks have much more reach and distribution now than they ever did in his own lifetime. Where’s the balance? Blogging about it, syndicating to social media, and then printing paper copies in annual increments?

📑 Publishers build a common tech platform together | Nieman Lab

Annotated Publishers build a common tech platform together by

Jonathan Gill (Nieman Lab)

One way to meet the many needs that most if not all publishers share would be to collaboratively develop their digital products. Specifically, they should build for interoperability. One publisher’s CMS, another’s content APIs, a third company’s data offering — they might one day all work together to allow all ships to rise and to reclaim advertising and subscription revenue from the platforms. This might allow publishers to refocus on differentiating where it truly matters for the user: in the quality of their content. ❧

Some of this is already afoot within the IndieWeb community with new protocols like Webmention, Micropub, WebSub, and Microsub. Journalists should know about this page on their wiki.

📑 The grand sweep of Literature and History | Indie Digital Media

Annotated The grand sweep of Literature and History by Richard MacManus (Indie Digital Media)

“I’m always genuinely happy to interact with listeners,” [Doug Metzger, Ph.D.] said, “and since some prefer social media, I use it. But my (thus far only modestly effective) strategy has been to try and produce enduring content and let it speak for itself, rather than posting ephemera on Facebook and Twitter at regular intervals.” ❧

I love his use of the word “ephemera” in relation to social media, particularly as he references his podcast about ancient history.

📑 Collaborative resource curation | Hypothes.is

Replied to Collaborative resource curation by Jon Udell (Hypothesis)

Recently we decided to keep better track of tweets, blog posts, and other web resources that mention and discuss our product. There are two common ways to do that: send links to a list maintainer, or co-edit a shared list of links. Here’s a third way, less common but arguably more powerful and flexible: tag the web resources in situ.

It isn’t rocket science, but as Jon indicates, it’s *incredibly *powerful.

I use my personal website with several levels of taxonomy for tagging and categorizing a variety of things for later search and research.

Much like the example of the Public Radio International producer, I’ve created what I call a “faux-cast” because I tag everything I listen to online and save it to my website including the appropriate <audio> link to the.mp3 file so that anyone who wants to follow the feed of my listens can have a playlist of all the podcast and internet-related audio I’m listening to.

A visual version of my “listened to” tags can be found at https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/ with the RSS feed at https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/feed/