Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)Trying to understand OAuth often feels like being trapped inside a maze of specs, trying to find your way out, before you can finally do what you actually set out to do: build your application. https://aaronparecki.com/2019/12/12/21/oauth-maze.png While this can be incredibly frustrating, it’s no ...
I’m thinking monthly to start, but I’m curious what days of the week and times might work best for people, especially across time zones?
Let me know if you’re interested in helping to organize or would like to join us to participate.
Featured image: Hard Drive Repair flickr photo by wwarby shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
That is probably it. Still feels like I'm cheating :P
— dave cormier (@davecormier) June 21, 2020
I find myself seeing some immediate and excellent historical examples in Dr. Ibram X. Kendi‘s book Stamped from the Beginning. In chapter nine of the book he discusses the variety and flavors of racism espoused by Thomas Jefferson in his book Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), which would become the most consumed American nonfiction book until well into the mid-nineteenth century.
Shortly afterward Samuel Stanhope Smith countered portions of Jefferson’s racist ideas in the 1787 annual oration to the august American Philosophical Society. This annual lecture was already one of the most heralded scholarly lectures in America and was attended by the wealthy and elite leaders and thinkers in the country. The lecture would be published as the influential Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species.
Samuel Stanhope Smith joined those preeminent intellectuals in Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society in attacking polygenesists, in reviving climate theory in America. His scholarly defense of scripture was quickly printed in Philadelphia, in London, and in Lord Kames’s back-yard, Edinburgh. By the time he sat down in Princeton’s presidential chair in 1795, he had amassed an international scholarly reputation.
So in just a few pages Kendi lays out some serious evidence of the direct spread of a wide variety of racist ideas by not only by the academic elite, but the leaders of multiple influential universities and scientific and philosophical institutions in America. The reverberating echos of these wrongs are still haunting us today. They still need to be addressed and righted. We need to use our moral alembic and distill these racist ideas out of science in America.
Lest one wonder about the influence of Samuel Stanhope Smith’s essay, I’ll note that Noah Webster cited Smith directly in Webster’s 1828 Dictionary in the definition of philosophy. The citation was from Smith’s second edition of his Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1810). The quote as given: “True religion, and true philosophy must ultimately arrive at the same principle.”
We’re obviously still seeking both true religion and true philosophy.
While you’re thinking about #shutdownSTEM on June 10th and long thereafter, I recommend you spend some time sitting with the ideas that have been handed down to us and question them closely, for this is what science and philosophy are all about. If you find you can’t do that hard work–and it is hard, then perhaps read a bit of Dr. Kendi’s excellent and ardent text Stamped from the Beginning.
It doesn’t seem to be available everywhere just yet.
SearchEngineLand notes that this could have an impact on the ad market, since a website’s visitors may be automatically scrolled down past its ads to the relevant content. The publication notes that sites may need to change the location of their ads in light of Google’s latest feature. ❧
And of course there will be crazy implications for the adtech space.
Annotated on June 04, 2020 at 09:30AM
Clicking the snippet still takes you to the webpage that it pulled the information from, but now the text from the snippet will be highlighted in yellow, and the browser will automatically scroll down to the section in question. ❧
This is a feature that’s been implemented in most browsers for a while as fragmentions.
Hypothes.is has supported this sort of functionality for a few years now as well.
I’m curious how these different implementations differ?
Annotated on June 04, 2020 at 09:36AM
and started testing the functionality on HTML pages last year ❧
According to Kevin Marks, this is the GitHub Repo they’ve been using for creating this work: https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment#:~:text=the%20worst&text=a%20Google&text=serious%20breakage&text=behavior
Annotated on June 04, 2020 at 12:08PM
Helpdesk support back in the day of the middle age with English subtitles. Original taken from the show "Øystein og jeg" on Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK)in 2001. With Øystein Backe (helper)and Rune Gokstad (desperate monk). Written by Knut Nærum.
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
Webmention is a relatively recent web standard (or W3C recommendation) that allows notifications when one website mentions a URL on another website. Think of it like @mentions on social platforms, but instead of just working within a particular website from one account to another, they work across websites. Your website can now @mention my website!
For those who are interested in delving deeper into the idea and its implications, I’ve written a primer in the past : Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet.
The goal is for other websites to be able to reference content in my TiddlyWiki website, and if those websites support sending the notifications as either webmentions (or the older pingbacks), I’ll get a notification that my content was referenced elsewhere on the web. This is just the beginning of allowing two way communication between websites.
My exploration today is how to quickly get these up and running on a public TiddlyWiki instance. The public part is important because webmentions won’t work for non-public URLs which includes private TiddlyWikis. If you’re wondering how to self-host a TiddlyWiki on your own domain, I’ve recently written up a tutorial for doing just that. At the end of this article, I’ll make a few notes about how one might use webmentions, particularly in a TiddlyWiki ecosystem.
I’ll start out by saying that writing a full JavaScript implementation of the Webmention spec is beyond my capabilities presently, but it could be something that TiddlyWiki core might implement in the future. (Maybe something like Lazymention which is written in node.js might be leveraged?)
Here I’m going to focus on using a third party service to do all of the heavy lifting and code our behalf. It’s relatively common, especially in the static website space, for websites to rely on third party or publisher services to either send or receive Webmentions on their behalf. Given my current knowledge of TiddlyWiki and how its internals work and my knowledge of Webmention services, I thought it would be quickest and easiest to look at using the Webmention.io service to handle receiving these @mentions from other sites on my behalf.
While this article may seem long, I’m hoping it’s detailed enough for those who are code averse to follow the recipe and do this themselves. If you can create a Tiddler, cut and paste some text, and follow the tutorial you won’t need to know anything about code. I did the entire thing myself in about five minutes from start to finish.
As a quick overview, we’re going to cut and paste a few lines of code into a special tiddler of our TiddlyWiki based website. This will allow us to do two things:
We’ll then rely on the Webmention.io dashboard to show us our notifications or received webmentions.
Webmention.io requires you to log in with your domain name/URL and relies on you being able to authenticate yourself using it. Since I’m not aware of an IndieAuth or equivalent mechanism for using TiddlyWiki to log into Webmention.io, the quickest method to accomplish this is to rely on RelMeAuth using IndieAuth.com to log into Webmention.io using either a Twitter or GitHub account. From a non-technical perspective, we’ll be using either our Twitter or GitHub account and it’s OAuth2 security to log into the service.
First we want to put a link to our public TiddlyWiki website into the website field on either Twitter or GitHub using the profile settings of one of those services. Here’s what mine looks like on GitHub:
Next we want to place a corresponding link to the relevant service into the <head> of our TiddlyWiki site using one (it’s okay to use both) of the the following lines of code:
<link rel="me" href="https://twitter.com/username" />
<link rel="me" href="https://github.com/username" />
where you will replace the username in these links with the respective usernames of your accounts. (I’ll note that you don’t need to do this for both accounts, you can use either Twitter or GitHub.)
To place these lines into the appropriate location on your TiddlyWiki, you’ll want to create a tiddler with a name like $:/plugins/indieweb/core/rawMarkup and the tag $:/tags/RawMarkup.
Then cut and paste one or both of these links as appropriate into this tiddler and save it (and your TiddlyWiki).
You should now be able to go to webmention.io and enter the URL for your TiddlyWiki into the web sign in box and click “sign in”. The service will parse your website’s page, find the link to either Twitter or GitHub and present you with the appropriate sign in button for one or both of those services. Click on the button for your chosen service. IndieAuth.com will then take you to that service to log into it, or, if you’re already logged in, it will take you back to webmention.io to your new account.
Within webmention.io you can now go to the “settings” page which will give you two more links which are your webmention and pingback endpoints. They will look something like this:
<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/example.com/webmention" />
<link rel="pingback" href="https://webmention.io/example.com/xmlrpc" />
where example.com will be replaced with the URL for your website.
Now you should cut and paste these two <link>s into the same tiddler you created above: $:/plugins/indieweb/core/rawMarkup. Now save the Tiddler and your TiddlyWiki. (Be sure to leave the previous links in case you need to log back into webmention.io in the future.)
That hopefully wasn’t too hard.
But what does this do? When another website links to your website and sends you a notification, the code on your page will delegate the receipt of the webmention to webmention.io which will verify that the sending site has your URL on a publicly viewable page (this helps to cut down on spam problems that pingbacks used to have). It will then store the notification for you.
If you need a reminder to check them occasionally, maybe you could add a Tiddler with the link to your dashboard to appear on your wiki when you open it next.
Perhaps in a future tutorial I’ll delve into the specifics of actually showing these mentions directly within your TiddlyWiki on the Tiddlers to which they relate.
Some may notice that I’ve put a small Webmention badge into the footer of my TiddlyWiki site to visually indicate to human readers that the site accepts webmentions. You can optionally do this for fun if you’d like.
Sending Webmentions seems to be an issue as the fragment-based URLs that TiddlyWiki uses as permalinks using JavaScript seem to cause an issue with many receivers. They apparently have problems resolving and parsing pages due to js;dr related issues. I would send webmentions manually, but most receivers I’m aware of have this js;dr problem. I’m not sure if there is an easy way around this issue.
What’s interesting about supporting Webmention, particularly from a TiddlyWiki perspective, is that if my TiddlyWiki is notified of mentions of it from outside sources, I can quickly cut and paste those responses directly into my Wiki pages in a pseudo-comment section similar to the comments section on this post which could serve as a model. If those mentions of a particular Tiddler are from other TiddlyWikis, I could also choose to drag-and-drop (or import) them into my TiddlyWiki!
If I want to go a step further, I could transclude those imported Tiddlers into the Tiddler that they’re in reference to. Perhaps I might do this under a heading of “@mentions” or perhaps “Comments” and suddenly I’ve got a way of displaying two-way conversations on my own TiddlyWiki site.
As is mentioned in Kicks Condor’s post about Hyperchat Modality, one could potentially use custom theming information (cleverly named “whostyles” in that post) from imported Tiddlers (or themes from other platforms) to identify the web identities of the sites they’re received from. I’ll also mention Kicks’ post about Hypertexting which is related and forms an interesting melange of websites, blogs, wikis, and hypertext of all kinds to form a more interesting web medium.
For the broader information collecting and building or academic communities (and here I can’t help thinking about the Open Educational Resources space that uses Creative Commons licensing to build their teaching resources), one could use these webmentions as a means of notifying sites that their content has been used, changed, or updated (typically those using Creative Commons will credit their source using a link). Then the receiver of the notification could optionally add to or change their version or even just collect the changes. This becomes particularly useful when the Tiddlers can be easily dragged and dropped between TiddyWikis!
As an explicit example, imagine a professor who wanted to build a textbook anthology, but who could do so by dragging and dropping a variety of Tiddlers from one site to another to create a quick textbook or reader for their students. This idea is particularly exciting to me when combined with the idea behind TW5-powered ebooks!
What could you imagine doing with webmention notifications on your TiddlyWiki site?
Because it is a single text file usually named index.html written in HTML, CSS and some JavaScript, I thought it would make an ideal candidate for a simple-to-use personal website that can be hosted on one’s own domain. As a researcher who appreciates the IndieWeb and Domain of One’s Own philosophies and uses my personal website as a commonplace book for both work and personal reasons, how could I resist?
TiddlyWiki is easy to use, highly flexible, modifiable, and can be easily copied, backed up, and shared. There’s an active community of users and developers for the platform which dates back to 2004. There are a variety of examples and documentation online and plugins are literally as simple as dragging and dropping some files from one source directly into your own Wiki. For those interested in the OER movement, individual Tiddlers (TiddlyWiki’s name for cards or discrete entries within the wiki) can be easily dragged and dropped from other TiddlyWikis to copy them!
There are some useful instructions for hosting it almost everywhere–except on one’s own domain name.
The few easy options I’ve found for hosting a TiddlyWiki publicly online as a website were rely on someone else’s service as a subdomain. As much as I like the idea of TiddlySpot I really wanted to use my own domain name (not to mention that it’s non-obvious how to host a newer TiddlyWiki version 5 (TW5) instance there). I’d also seen TiddlySpace shut down a few years ago and didn’t want to deal with that potentiality—though I will admit that exporting would be as simple as downloading and moving a single file!
So after a month or so at tinkering around at several complicated solutions that always seemed beyond my grasp, I went back to IndieWeb basics. What is their recommendation for the easiest way to get a website up and running? The fact that an empty TiddlyWiki file is named index.html gave me my answer: set up a GitHub Pages-based website and simply connect it to my domain!
However, as simple as this pathway may seem to some, I thought I’d briefly document the process I took so others can do the same for themselves.
First I’ll presume you’ve got a domain name and a host that will allow you to change the CNAME for where your domain name is pointed. (If you don’t, check out https://indieweb.org/personal-domain for details.)
In short, you’re going to upload a single file to your GitHub account and then point your domain name at it.
The idea of GitHub may scare a lot of people, but you won’t need to use git, know any git commands, or even know how git works since I’ll describe steps that entirely use the graphical user interface and don’t come anywhere near using the command line or any complicated GitHub applications. It’ll be as easy as dragging and dropping.
Let’s start!
index.html to a convenient place on your computer.username.github.io, where username is your username (or organization name if you’re doing it for your organization) on GitHub.index.html file you saved on your computer or you can click “choose your files” to find and upload the file.index.html file in it.example.com into the field and click the “Save” button.
Hsiaoming Yang (Just lepture)Let's create a beautiful RSS feed UI for human before its dead in next year again.
For the past ten years, I have written a lengthy year-end series, documenting some of the dominant narratives and trends in education technology. I think it is worthwhile, as the decade draws to a close, to review those stories and to see how much (or how little) things have changed. You can read the series here: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019.
I thought for a good long while about how best to summarize this decade, and inspired by the folks at The Verge, who published a list of “The 84 biggest flops, fails, and dead dreams of the decade in tech,” I decided to do something similar: chronicle for you a decade of ed-tech failures and fuck-ups and flawed ideas.
I started reading this over the holidays when Audrey released it. It took me four sittings to make it all the way through (in great part because it’s so depressing). I’ve finally picked it back up today to wallow through the last twenty on the list.
I’m hoping that at least a few people pick up the thread she’s always trying to show us and figure out a better way forward. The information theorist in me says that every student has only so much bandwidth and there’s an analogy to the Shannon Limit for how much information one can cram into a person. I’ve been a fan of Cesar Hidalgo’s idea of a personbyte (a word for the limit of information one can put into a person) and the fact that people need to collaborate to produce things bigger and greater than themselves. What is it going to take to get everyone else to understand?
If anything, the only way I suspect we’ll be able to better teach and have students retain information is to use some of the most ancient memory techniques from indigenous cultures rather than technologizing our way out of the perceived problem.
(only a small portion since HackedEducation doesn’t fit into my usual workflow)
In his review of Nick Srnicek’s book Platform Capitalism, John Hermann writes,
Platforms are, in a sense, capitalism distilled to its essence. They are proudly experimental and maximally consequential, prone to creating externalities and especially disinclined to address or even acknowledge what happens beyond their rising walls. And accordingly, platforms are the underlying trend that ties together popular narratives about technology and the economy in general. Platforms provide the substructure for the “gig economy” and the “sharing economy”; they’re the economic engine of social media; they’re the architecture of the “attention economy” and the inspiration for claims about the “end of ownership.”
Annotated on March 08, 2020 at 02:35PM
It isn’t just the use of student data to fuel Google’s business that’s a problem; it’s the use of teachers as marketers and testers. “It’s a private company very creatively using public resources — in this instance, teachers’ time and expertise — to build new markets at low cost,” UCLA professor Patricia Burch told The New York Times in 2017 as part of its lengthy investigation into “How Google Took Over the Classroom.”
Annotated on March 08, 2020 at 03:04PM
Structured markup geek. Programmer. Photographer. Author. XML. DocBook. XProc. XSLT. XQuery.
I am currently an employee of MarkLogic Corporation where I’m an engineer. I work out of my home in Austin, TX. Previously, I was employed by Sun Microsystems, Arbortext, and O’Reilly Media (then O’Reilly & Associates).
Jamie Tanna (Jamie Tanna)Noting Google's continued support for Microformats as a metadata format.