Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris examine their evolving thoughts on classroom technology and online education. A lot has changed in a short time, they found.
Nice little interview. Definitely makes me want to read the book.
Category: Technology
🎧 Tech Was Supposed to Be Society’s Great Equalizer. What Happened? | Crazy/Genius | The Atlantic
Derek Thompson from The AtlanticIn a special bonus episode of the podcast Crazy/Genius, the computer scientist and data journalist Meredith Broussard explains how “technochauvinism” derailed the dream of the digital revolution.
I was excited to hear Dr. Meredith Broussard, a brilliant colleague I’ve met via the Dodging the Memory Hole series of conferences, on this podcast from The Atlantic. I would recommend this special episode (one of their very best) to just about anyone. In particular there’s something to be gained in the people side of what the IndieWeb movement is doing as well as for their efforts towards inclusion.
From a broader perspective, I think there’s certainly something to be learned from not over-sensationalizing artificial intelligence. Looking at the history of the automobile as a new technology over a century ago is a pretty good parallel example. While it’s generally done a lot of good, the automobile has also brought along a lot of additional societal problems, ills, and costs with it as well.
I hadn’t yet heard about her new book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World which I’m ordering a copy of today. I suspect that it’s in the realm of great books like Cathy O’Neill’s Weapons of Math Distraction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy which was also relevant to some of the topics within this podcast.
👓 The Cybersec World Is Debating Who to Believe in This Story About a Massive Hack | Motherboard | Vice
No one is really sure who to believe after Businessweek's bombshell story on an alleged Chinese supply chain attack against Apple, Amazon, and others.
Attending the weekly Innovate Pasadena Friday Coffee Meetup to hear about The Future of Healthcare: Digital Health Becomes Personal.
Update after the talk
The presentation was interesting, but awfully dull. There was nothing I wasn’t aware of and nothing truly groundbreaking on the tech side. It’s actually a bit more of the same from the perspective of someone trying to use an app to improve public health. The futility of the process reminds me a lot of the issues that the edtech sector faces with people trying to innovate in education. Everyone seems to be falling into the same old traps and ultimately not making the massive difference they’re looking to effect.
It rarely, if ever, happens, but the presenters literally jammed out of the room before the event was completely over. Many were shocked by it.
👓 Why History Matters | Audrey Watters
This talk was given today to Eddie Maloney’s class at Georgetown University (specifically, its Learning and Design program) on “Technology & Innovation By Design”
Following Stephen Downes
Stephen Downes is a specialist in online learning technology and new media. Through a 25 year career in the field Downes has developed and deployed a series of progressively more innovative technologies, beginning with multi-user domains (MUDs) in the 1990s, open online communities in the 2000s, and personal learning environments in the 2010s. Downes is perhaps best known for his daily newsletter, OLDaily, which is distributed by web, email and RSS to thousands of subscribers around the world, and as the originator of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), is a leading voice in online and networked learning, and has authored learning management and content syndication software.
Downes is known as a leading proponent of connectivism, a theory describing how people know and learn using network processes. Hence he has also published in the areas of logic and reasoning, 21st century skills, and critical literacies. Downes is also recognized as a leading voice in the open education movement, having developed early work in learning objects to a world-leading advocacy of open educational resources and free learning. Downes is widely recognized for his deep, passionate and articulate exposition of a range of insights melding theories of education and philosophy, new media and computer technology. He has published hundreds of articles online and in print and has presented around the world to academic conferences in dozens of countries on five continents.
I’d been following several of Stephen’s web properties previously, but I’m adding his Half an Hour site as well as his Mastodon instance today.
🎧 The value of rituals in a digital world | ABC Radio National
Are rituals still needed in a world mediated through digital devices?
We tend to think of rituals as solemn ceremonies, usually associated with religion. But rituals exist in our everyday life, as a way of helping us to make sense of the world. They can be communal or solitary. But how are they changing as we become increasing digital? Can rituals still have power and relevance in a world mediated through digital devices?
Guests
Michael Norton – Professor, Harvard Business School
Vanessa Ochs – Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Member of the Jewish Studies Program, University of Virginia
Viktor Lysell Smalanning – Ritual designer
Alexandra Samuel – digital columnist for JSTOR Daily and regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal
Nicolas Nova – Associate Professor, Geneva School of Art and Design
A fascinating topic in general, but there are some interesting tidbits that the IndieWeb movement could pick up as transitional rituals within its workflow. Similarly, while some of the jargon helps to identify group membership, we still need to do a better job of simplifying it to make it easier to have a broader membership. The episode actually brings up the idea of UI and designers taking ritual into account in our daily lives.
What types of rituals can we create to help mark the leaving behind of the old social world and becoming a fully fledged member of the indie web by registering one’s own domain and having one’s own website? Perhaps a ritual to celebrate not only this but the addition of standards like Webmention, Micropub, and Microsub? In some small sense, this is what we’re celebrating in the use of displaying buttons (or badges) on our sites.
This is definitely worth listening to again and brainstorming ideas for extending the concept. Perhaps at an upcoming IWC??
hat tip: Aaron Davis
🎧 Is Online Dating Destroying Romance? | Crazy/Genius | The Atlantic
Derek Thompson from Crazy/Genius | The AtlanticTwo sociologists debate the merits of online dating and discuss their research on the history of romance in America.
Interestingly no discussion of satisficing.
👓 Limo firm to Uber: You misclassify your drivers as contractors, which is unfair | Ars Technica
Diva Limousine sues Uber, claims its reliance on contractors is illegal.
I wonder what percentage of their valuation is built upon screwing their employees out of benefits by calling them independent contractors?
👓 General Motors activates OnStar Crisis Assist for Hurricane Florence | Ars Technica
It will offer real-time directions, free calling, and Wi-Fi, among other aid.
Blue sky sketch for Overcast
Marco Arment on Twitter (Twitter)Podcast hosts and app makers: Let's make it easier for podcasters to surface donate/pay/membership links in our UIs with a standard semantic way to denote payment URLs in HTML show notes.
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) August 11, 2018
Does such a thing exist already in any useful HTML spec? Maybe an <a rel="something">?Podcasters and CMS makers: Next version of Overcast looks for a link in every episode's show notes with <a rel="payment">.
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) August 12, 2018
If present, Overcast adds a nice green "$" button on the Now Playing screen that opens up that donation/Patreon/membership URL of your choice.
Marco, your post about supporting rel=”payment” for Overcast made me start thinking about other potential solve-able problems in the podcast space. Now that you’ve solved a piece of the support/payment problem, perhaps you can solve for a big part of the “who actually listened to my podcast” problem?
In a recent article on the topic of Webmention for A List Apart, I covered the topic of listen posts and sending webmentions for them. In addition to people being able to post on their own website that they’ve listened to a particular episode, the hosting podcast site can receive these mentions and display them as social proof that the episode was actually listened to. In addition to individual websites being able to do this, it would be awesome if podcast players/apps could send webmentions on behalf of their users (either with user specific data like Name, website, avatar, etc. if it’s stored, without it, or anonymized by the player itself) so that the canonical page for the podcast could collect (and potentially display) them.
As a proof of concept, here’s a page for a podcast episode that can receive webmentions. Someone listens to it, makes a “listen post” on their site, and sends a webmention of that fact. The original page can then collect it on the backend or display it if it chooses. Just imagine what this could do for the podcast world at scale for providing actual listening statistics?
In addition to aggregate numbers of downloads a podcast is receiving, they could also begin to have direct data about actual listens. Naturally the app/player would have to set (or allow a configuration) some percentage threshold of how much was played before sending such a notification to the receiving site. Perhaps the webmention spec for listens could also include the data for the percentage listened and send that number in the payload?
The toughest part may be collecting the rel=”canonical” URL for the podcast’s post (to send the webmention there) rather than the audio file’s URL, though I suspect that the feed for the podcast may have this depending on the feed’s source.
If you want to go a step further, you could add Micropub support to Overcast, so that when people are done listening to episodes, the app could send a micropub request to their registered website (perhaps via authentication using IndieAuth?). This would allow people to automatically make “listen posts” to their websites using Overcast and thereby help those following them to discover new and interesting podcasts. (Naturally, you might need a setting for sites that support both micropub and webmention, so that the app doesn’t send a webmention when it does a micropub post for a site that will then send a second webmention as well.)
One could also have podcast players with Micropub support that would allow text entry for commenting on particular portions of podcasts (perhaps using media fragments)? Suddenly we’re closer to commenting on individual portions of audio content in a way that’s not too dissimilar to SoundCloud’s commenting interface, but done in a more open web way.
As further example, I maintain a list of listen posts on my personal website. Because it includes links to the original audio files, it also becomes a “faux-cast” that friends and colleagues can subscribe to everything I’m listening to (or sub-categorizations thereof) via RSS. Perhaps this also works toward helping to fix some of the discovery problem as well?
Thanks, as always, for your dedication to building one of the best podcast tools out there!
👓 The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995 | Motherboard | Vice
This really gives a new meaning to the “paper of record."
👓 Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web | The Guardian
The decentralised web, or DWeb, could be a chance to take control of our data back from the big tech firms. So how does it work and when will it be here?
👓 Think About Capabilities, Not Permissions | The Piraeus
I suggest we can move OER forward by shifting the conversation from permissions to capabilities.
👓 Evernote lost its CTO, CFO, CPO and HR head in the last month as it eyes another fundraise | TechCrunch
Evernote, the productivity app with 225 million users that lets people take notes and organise other files from their working and non-work life, has been on a mission to reset its image as the go-to service for those seeking tools to help themselves be more efficient, years after losing its place a…