read | Chris Aldrich

👓 The Smear: A career-killing lie almost ruined this rising Minneapolis dance star | City Pages

Read The Smear: A career-killing lie almost ruined this rising Minneapolis dance star (City Pages)

On the morning of October 21, 2017, the budding New York choreographer Jinah Parker was sitting in bed, her husband lying alongside, when she opened her email and found a deeply unsettling, one-paragraph message about her debut dance production.

The show was called SHE, a Choreoplay, an off-off-Broadway interpretative dance in which four women vividly monologize rape and abuse.

Parker wrote and directed. Her newlywed husband, Kevin Powell, was the producer. In 1992, as a tenacious 26-year-old activist, he appeared on the inaugural season of MTV’s genre-defining reality show, The Real World. In the decades since, he’d become a prolific public speaker, author of 13 books, and a two-time congressional candidate.

Powell also has a history of violence. He assaulted women in college and once shoved a girlfriend into a bathroom door. Now he’s a sophist of male fragility, and an essential component of his activist repertoire is to engage in public reflection—usually with equal parts self-effacement and self-righteousness—upon this personal shame.

A great example why hot takes involving coming at people and seemingly outting them without the appropriate research can be terribly dangerous.

It would seem that this couple got just what they had coming to them, though it’s a bit disingenuous that they can go to crowd funding platforms to spread the blame out. I’m hoping that it was only all the people to whom they spread their invective to that ended helping to foot part of their bill.

👓 OER as an Institutional Survival Strategy | Inside Higher Ed

Read OER as an Institutional Survival Strategy by Matt Reed (Inside Higher Ed)

The difference between “tuition and fees” and “total cost of attendance.”

A nice highlighting of why administrators should be pushing for OER. Unfortunately lost here is the actual cost of the remainder of the enterprise. Where do these OER resources come from? Who creates them? Who gets paid to create and maintain them? Or quite often, whose resources, time, and effort are being exploited to use them? Additionally, who on the institutional level is being paid to talk about OER, push it, educate educators about it, and help professors adopt it?

While it’s readily transparent how his accounting works in this limited example, there’s a lot more accounting and transparency that needs to be taken into account.

Let’s not take the cost and just shift it to others who are also ill-equipped to handle it.

👓 Journalism is the conversation. The conversation is journalism. | Jeff Jarvis

Read Journalism is the conversation. The conversation is journalism. by Jeff Jarvis (Medium)

I am sorely disappointed in The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo, CNN’s Brian Stelter, and other journalists who these days are announcing to…

I appreciate Jeff Jarvis’ points here about not succumbing to the techno-panic, but at the same time we do need some better ways to find and disseminate these stories than relying on toxic platforms. The conversation needs more space and flexibility and perhaps this is also part of the problem. There’s no reason we couldn’t simultaneously hope for better tools for journalists while still doing as Jeff indicates. Some journalists enjoy and find value in doing battlefield reporting, but this obviously isn’t for everyone. While platforms like Twitter make finding some unseen stories easier, they definitely aren’t the end-all-be-all of the depth and breadth of stories out there. Relying solely on looking at the conversation through the lens of Twitter isn’t always the best or even only way to appreciate the broader conversation. There are far more trenches we all need to be exploring.

Here yet again, I can’t help but think that journalistic outlets ought to be using their platforms and their privilege and extend them to their audiences as a social media platform of sorts. This could kill the siren song of the toxic platforms and simultaneously bring the journalists and the public into a more direct desperate congress. There is nothing stopping CNN or The New York Times from building an open version of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or even blogging platform on which everyone could participate. In fact, there are already several news outlets that have gotten into the content management system business and are selling their wares to other newspapers and magazines. Why not go a half-step further and allow the public to use them as well? The IndieWeb model for this seems like an interesting one which could dramatically benefit both sides and even give journalism another useful revenue stream.

👓 ‘I predict a great revolution’: inside the struggle to define life | the Guardian

Read 'I predict a great revolution': inside the struggle to define life by Ian Sample (the Guardian)

Paul Davies thinks combining physics and biology will reveal a pattern of information management

hat tip: Philip Ball

Very nice profile by @iansample in the @guardian of Paul Davies and his new book The Demon in the Machine. Paul’s book is a very nice statement of intent to answer Schrödinger’s question, and honest about what we don’t know. https://t.co/9FeHArKaA5

— Philip Ball (@philipcball) January 26, 2019

Read The Real Roots of American Rage (The Atlantic)

The untold story of how anger became the dominant emotion in our politics and personal lives—and what we can do about it.