tools | Chris Aldrich

Replied to a post by

Jane Van Galen (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)

We've talked about and experimented with various video projects in our Learning Community. Reading this piece by sociologist Jess Calarco this week reminded me that we haven't talked as much about audio production and editing as a means having students show what they know and to share what they've learned on the open web.

I recall seeing a lot of resources for audio media creation and podcasting via KQED Teach, which was geared toward a broad level of students and technical abilities.

These types of literacies are really important to explore.

Watched Connecting to the IndieWeb Movement by

Jim Groom from bavatuesdays

Tomorrow at 12 PM Eastern/ 9 AM Pacific I’ll be be hosting a Connected Courses discussion that will explore the IndieWeb movement as a people-centered response to the corporate web. How do core IndieWeb principles such as owning your content, remaining better connected, and redefining control online intersect with the values of connected learning? Take a bit of time tomorrow and join myself, Mikhail Gershovich, Ben Werdmuller, Erin Jo Richey, and Simon Thomson to find out more.

I particularly love how they all underline the humanity that should and does underlie the web. This is certainly a classic for the area of IndieWeb and education. I’m not sure how I hadn’t seen this before.

[Withknown is] the posterchild of the IndieWeb.
— Jim Groom

I’ll agree that it is pretty darn awesome!

Some slight rephrasings from Ben in the video that I thought were spot on:

IndieWeb: allowing people to connect online without caring about what platforms or services they’re using.

IndieWeb puts the learner first. The LMS, which primarily serves an administrative function, should not be the center of the process.

Read Project Naptha (projectnaptha.com)

Project Naptha automatically applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on every image you see while browsing the web. The result is a seamless and intuitive experience, where you can highlight as well as copy and paste and even edit and translate the text formerly trapped within an image.

What the hand dare seize the ﬁre? ❧

I find it so heartening that one can use Project Naptha to highlight, copy and paste, and even edit and translate text formerly trapped within an image.

I’m further impressed that it also works with Hypothes.is!
–December 01, 2019 at 09:40AM

Though upon revisiting, it seems like the text is temporarily highlighted on Hypothesis (which probably only works with Naptha installed), then disappears, and the annotation is shown as an orphan.

Apparently Naptha only acts as a middle layer to allow the OCR of the image and that without it, the fingerprinting process Hypothes.is uses can’t find it after the fact.

Perhaps Hypothes.is could recognize that the highlighted text is being supplied by a third-party layer and instead of orphaning the highlighted text, it could anchor the highlight to the associated image instead? ❧
–December 01, 2019 at 09:44AM

Naptha, its current name, is drawn from an even more tenuous association. See, it comes from the fact that “highlighter” kind of sounds like “lighter”, and that naptha is a type of fuel often used for lighters. It was in fact one of the earliest codenames of the project, and brought rise to a rather fun little easter egg which you can play with by quickly clicking about a dozen times over some block of text inside a picture. ❧

Now if only I could do this with my Hypothes.is annotations! Talk about highlighting!
–December 01, 2019 at 10:06AM

There is a class of algorithms for something called “Inpainting”, which is about reconstructing pictures or videos in spite of missing pieces. This is widely used for film restoration, and commonly found in Adobe Photoshop as the “Content-Aware Fill” feature. ❧

This reminds me of a tool called asciinema that allows highlighting text within a video.
–December 01, 2019 at 10:13AM

Replied to Group Chat Rules by Randall Munroe (xkcd)

2. SHOW YOU CARE BY TRIMMING THE TRACKING JUNK OFF LINKS YOU PASTE. ❧

There’s a tool for that by the way.

Replied to Stories in Unexpected Places by Alan Levine (CogDogBlog)

While the tech choruses croon on about scale and AI and datadatadata, I prefer the long tail. Looking in the corners of digital stuff I marvel when you find small signs of quirky human presence. Li…

Looks like he went on to build some other nice little web tools like ProjectNaptha!

Read E-books at libraries are a huge hit, leading to long waits, reader hacks and worried publishers by Heather Kelly (Washington Post)

While some people are scrambling to collect log-ins for Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu and, now, Disney Plus, Sarah Jacobsson Purewal is working on a different kind of hustle. She signs up for any public library that will have her to find and reserve available e-books.

I’ve always had a dozen or so library cards at any one time, so I guess I’ve never really bothered to go out of my way to collect more for the digital games people are playing here with books. I have however very naturally checked several library systems for books in this way, however I find that many libraries just don’t have the titles I’m looking for anywhere.

I liked the tip about putting one’s e-reader into airplane mode to keep it from updating and removing overdue books. Of course there are some more technical methods of stripping DRM or even pirating books which I was a bit surprised they didn’t delve into, but which are frequently mentioned with respect to college textbook related articles.