Jeremy Cherfas (Jeremy Cherfas)Maintaining a website that you regard as your own does require maintenance. Like a garden, you may choose to let a few weeds flourish, for the wildlife, and you may also seek to encourage volunteers, for the aesthetics. A garden without wildlife is dull, a garden without aesthetics is pointless. ❧
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. ❧
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.
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? ❧
“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
Online media, despite being so different from traditional printed media, is still trying to maximize its potential audience, and in order to do that, going for quantity over quality. ❧
Joyce Garcia (Gratuitous Web Presence)commonplace book ❧
Joyce Garcia (Gratuitous Web Presence)Then I learned about the IndieWeb movement and Micro.blog, and I fell in love with the Internet as I once hoped it would be: a place where people could congregate, converse, and learn from one another with somewhat minimal rancor — and without an overtly overarching need to make a buck with their “content.” ❧
This site is where I can riff on ideas, be wrong, and learn from those mistakes. Of course I try to be correct, and I always write what I believe to be true, but the greatest value most often comes from someone messaging me to point out a body of research I missed or angle I misinterpreted.
In this vein, please don't hesitate to let me know what you think! The whole point is to share what I know and to learn the rest. ❧
Cheri Baker (social.cheribaker.com)To participate in the economy, we’re encouraged to shape ourselves into a strategically pleasing form, always with a sale in mind.
we’re encouraged to shape ourselves into a strategically pleasing form
almost exactly what women have been attempting to fix with much of the feminist movement? We should all just be ourselves. Trying to “stay on message” is just painful. The message should be: “This is my life, and I’ll do with it as I please.”
Cheri Baker (social.cheribaker.com)“You should write down your brand statement, and then EVERYTHING you communicate online (or around your customers) should be in line with that statement. In short, if it doesn’t advance your brand, don’t share or say it.”
And my heart rose up in revolt and shouted: F@CK THAT SH*T!
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? ❧
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…
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. ❧
Marie Poulin (Oki Doki Digital)Looking at some of those bullet journal masterpieces made me wonder, how much of bullet journaling is just...productivity porn? ❧
My bullet journal has to be the most spartan and utilitarian book of lists ever created.
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. ❧
“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.” ❧