Greg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)We need to take back the web. It is time to seize control of your own data, take control of your data and help build a community that shares your values. Please join us and the The Siedenberg Computer Science and Information Systems School at Pace University https://www.pace.edu/seidenberg/ for two ...
Given the location and some of the potential topics, this portends some interesting things!
For some people and some learning styles, technology is a scary and uncomfortable word, let alone medium. Yes, students of today understand technology better than most adults. But, that doesn’t mean that all students understand technology to the same extent as their peers. We have created many opportunities to even the playing field for learning differences in our educational system, but have we done enough to do that with technology? Or do we just assume that all students understand it to the same extent and glide over those that don’t? I believe that we assume… We haven’t done enough to make sure that all students are comfortable with technology and we NEED to do that moving forward. Why? Because technology is here to stay and we need to make sure that we bring enough students along on this journey as possible.
Marco (marcozehe.de)My name is Marco, and I’m working as the Mozilla accessibility QA engineer and evangelist. I joined Mozilla on December 3rd, 2007. Initially working from within the QA team, I transferred to the newly founded dedicated accessibility team in April of 2011. Before my full-time employment, I voluntee...
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Longreads, Simplenote and a few other things, is acquiring Brooklyn-based startup Atavist. Atavist has been working on a content management system for independent bloggers and writers. With an Atavist website, you can easily write and publi…
Directed by Rian Johnson. With Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher. Rey develops her newly discovered abilities with the guidance of Luke Skywalker, who is unsettled by the strength of her powers. Meanwhile, the Resistance prepares for battle with the First Order.
Doug Belshaw (Connected Learning Alliance)Ten years ago, if I knew someone primarily through online means, you could guarantee they had their own domain name. It was just before the big explosion in social media use which meant that if you wanted a space online, you had to create it. This provided a barrier to entry in terms of the digital literacy skills required to register a domain, set up the necessary software and, of course, design, build and upload a website. The upside was that your digital identity was yours. That domain name could be your gamer tag, it could be your real name, it could be a heteronym — it was up to you!
Ten years ago, if I knew someone primarily through online means, you could guarantee they had their own domain name. It was just before the big explosion in social media use which meant that if you wanted a space online, you had to create it. This provided a barrier to entry in terms of the digital literacy skills required to register a domain, set up the necessary software and, of course, design, build and upload a website. The upside was that your digital identity was yours. ❧
Why have we gotten away from this? In short, I think it’s because it was easier for big companies with massive resources to do the initial heavy lifting.
If we look at history, Gutenberg created the first printing press and guarded it heavily for years. Eventually others figured out how to do it and printing presses spread like wildfire. Now, with some modest means and some time, almost anyone can publish.
With simple standards and accessible hosting people can now broadly own their own domain name and create their own websites using a variety of content management systems. In a few years, this will be even more ubiquitous. Facebook is going to be just like Gutenberg attempting to hold onto his monopoly, but failing miserably.
The best part, I think, is that the speed of digital technology means that the Facebook edifice is going to crumble faster than Gutenberg’s.
Twitter and Facebook are publicly-traded companies and beholden to shareholders looking to make a profit. Google, which owns YouTube and processes over 70% of the world’s search traffic, is likewise legally obliged to return a profit. ❧
legally obligated? they’re definitely supposed to try or shareholders may move their money elsewhere, but why can’t they create things for the common good as well?
A world where one’s primary identity is found through the social people-farms of existing social networks is a problematic one. Educators and parents are in the privileged position of being able to help create a better future, but we need to start modeling to future generations what that might look like. ❧
This is exactly what I’ve been attempting to do with my own website. Naturally I use it selfishly for my own purposes, but I’m also using it to model potential behaviours for friends, family and colleagues.
I’m sometimes tempted to change the tagline on my website to “A digital canary in the coalmine”.
Learn in six easy steps how to become a master blogger (Caveat the only way is to read and write a lot)
The idea of decorating one’s locker as an example of presenting one’s identity in school is interesting. I also liked the idea that students continued using a forum long after the class was over–presumably because it represented their identity and connections and relationships from the class.
Dr. Mary Kalantzis from YouTube Human Diversity and Learner Transformation
Learner identities, Big History, and collective learning also generally remind me about shrinking numbers of languages, which I’ve mentioned before. In teaching and passing on knowledge, we will need to be even far more accomodating about culture and language, or eventually we’ll loose all of the diversity of languages we’ve got today.
In digging around a bit I note that Dr. Kalantzis has some interesting course content available on Coursera that might be worth delving into shortly as well.
http://example.com/?s=searchterm&feed=rss2A short explanation of RSS and how it helps you save time reading the web.
This video introduces RSS as a way to subscribe to websites and save time on the Web. An "old vs. new" theme illustrates how RSS differs from visiting web sites independently, including:
• The new and old ways of reading news on the web
• An introduction to RSS Readers
• How to identify and subscribe to an RSS feed
• What to expect when using an RSS reader
Author tab and then put the source of the quote into the name field instead, but the output is still pretty solid, though some of the wrapped metadata that the plugin provides will be slightly off.Confusion gets a bad rap.
A textbook that confuses its readers sounds like a bad textbook. Teachers who confuse their students sound like bad teachers.
But research suggests that some of the time, confusion can actually be a good thing — an important step toward learning.
hat tip: mrkean.com
David Shanske (David Shanske)There have been some issues with Quill and other services advising that the WordPress Micropub endpoint did not return a Location header. There seems to be some confusion about this, which is partly because the message is a bit technical. One individual thought that this was related to Simple Locati...
David Brooks (nytimes.com)National politics needs a leader devoted to redistributing power downward.