Read How and why to tell your story online, revisited (Jon Udell)
I wrote this essay in 2006 as part of a series of Internet explainers I did for New Hampshire Public Radio. It never aired for reasons lost to history, so I’m publishing this 15-year-old time…

Thomas Mahon is a Savile Row tailor. His shop in London caters to people who can spend two thousand pounds on a classic handmade suit. I’ll never be in the market for one of those, but if I were I’d be fascinated by Mahon’s blog, EnglishCut.com, which tells you everything you might want to know about Savile Row past and present, about how Mahan practices the craft of bespoke tailoring, and about how to buy and care for the garments he makes. 

I went down a rabbit hole just the other day on this topic. Bookmarking this for for some future journeys.
Annotated on February 06, 2021 at 12:38AM

We’ve always used the term ‘social networking’ to refer to the process of finding and connecting with those people. And that process has always depended on a fabric of trust woven most easily in the context of local communities and face-to-face interaction. 

Too much of modern social networking suffers from this fabric of trust and rampant context collapse. How can we improve on these looking forward?
Annotated on February 06, 2021 at 12:40AM

Watched IndieTrustWeb from IndieWebCamp Austin 2020 | Internet Archive

Some interesting ideas here, but I don’t feel like there are any that I could run with and want to build some concrete functionality out of. I suppose that more of my interest in this area relates to ideas about aggregation and discovery.
Listened to PURPLE EPISODE 3: Let’s Not Discount Reality from On the Media | WNYC Studios

How a propaganda war by the private sector led to a decline of trust in government.

As part of a month-long campaign called the Purple Project for Democracy, OTM is using its podcast feed for a series of conversations about an alarming loss of trust, faith and devotion by Americans for American democracy — and what to do about it. Bob himself is one of the Purple Project organizers. We recommend that you listen to this four-part mini-series in order. In this third episode he explores some of the causes for disaffection.

One of the reasons so many Americans have lost trust and faith is democratic institutions is simple misunderstanding about how the system is designed to work.  Another, however, is familiarity with how the system does work— which isn’t exactly of, by and for the People. Anand Giridharadas is author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. He says the founders also didn’t plan on politicians constantly trash-talking government itself and that a decline in trust in government is the result of a concerted, private sector propaganda war waged over the last four decades.

📑 The Vulnerability of Learning | Cathie LeBlanc

Replied to The Vulnerability of Learning by Cathie LeBlancCathie 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.  

I’m reminded here of the broad idea that many bloggers write about sooner or later of their website being a “thought space” or place to contemplate out in the open. More often than not, even if they don’t have an audience to interact with, their writings become a way of thinking out loud, clarifying things for themselves, self-evolving, or putting themselves out there for potential public reactions (good, bad, or indifferent).

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.

👓 The Vulnerability of Learning | Desert of My Real Life

Read The Vulnerability of Learning by Cathie LeBlancCathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)
Listening to the students talk about feeling unsure and vulnerable when they first encountered open educational practices made me think about my own learning. As a mid-career academic who has changed jobs and even disciplines, I am a confident learner. I have received lots of praise and other kinds of positive reinforcement for my ability to learn new things. If you have read previous posts on my blog, you might know that I am really interested in developments in the IndieWeb movement and am trying to write about some of my experiences with using IndieWeb tools to build my own web site. I’ve been building my own sites for years and so I have a lot of confidence in my ability there as well. Working on the IndieWeb stuff has been challenging because there’s a lot of new language and new concepts as well as some aspects of web development that I have not engaged with before. I often feel vulnerable when I write my posts about the IndieWeb because my understanding of how everything works is emerging. In other words, I don’t get it all yet but I’m still writing publicly about my work.

📑 The Vulnerability of Learning | Cathie LeBlanc

Replied to The Vulnerability of Learning by Cathie LeBlancCathie 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?  

What a relief to hear this! The hardest part about writing my response was in possibly coming off too hard or painfully pedantic and not wanting to turn you off in your explorations.

🔖 Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Bookmarked Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama (Free Press)
In his bestselling The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War would also mean the beginning of a struggle for position in the rapidly emerging order of 21st-century capitalism. In Trust, a penetrating assessment of the emerging global economic order "after History," he explains the social principles of economic life and tells us what we need to know to win the coming struggle for world dominance. Challenging orthodoxies of both the left and right, Fukuyama examines a wide range of national cultures in order to divine the underlying principles that foster social and economic prosperity. Insisting that we cannot divorce economic life from cultural life, he contends that in an era when social capital may be as important as physical capital, only those societies with a high degree of social trust will be able to create the flexible, large-scale business organizations that are needed to compete in the new global economy. A brilliant study of the interconnectedness of economic life with cultural life, Trust is also an essential antidote to the increasing drift of American culture into extreme forms of individualism, which, if unchecked, will have dire consequences for the nation's economic health.
h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

Given the large number of “Trust” and “Truth” related books being released this year, most in reference to Donald J. Trump’s administration, this might be an interesting read which takes him out of the equation and potentially better underlines the bigger problem we’re seeing in a growing anti-scientific leaning America?

For those interested in misinformation, journalism, authority, trust, verification, fact checking, etc., the MisInfoCon is going on this week in Washington. Some interesting things in the Twitter feed for #misinfocon.

It’s a Hacks/Hackers project.

Some of the details might be useful for digital pedagogy settings as well. May make an interesting project for those in EDU522 especially if you’re considering the hoax website assignment?

👓 Amazon Key is a new service that lets couriers unlock your front door | The Verge

Read Amazon Key is a new service that lets couriers unlock your front door by Ben Popper (The Verge)
The service is called Amazon Key, and it relies on a Amazon’s new Cloud Cam and compatible smart lock. The camera is the hub, connected to the internet via your home Wi-Fi. The camera talks to the lock over Zigbee, a wireless protocol utilized by many smart home devices. When a courier arrives with a package for in-home delivery, they scan the barcode, sending a request to Amazon’s cloud. If everything checks out, the cloud grants permission by sending a message back to the camera, which starts recording. The courier then gets a prompt on their app, swipes the screen, and voilà, your door unlocks. They drop off the package, relock the door with another swipe, and are on their way. The customer will get a notification that their delivery has arrived, along with a short video showing the drop-off to confirm everything was done properly.
There’s a lot of trust Amazon is asking people for in it’s last few products. Alexa could listen (and potentially record) anything you say, cameras in your bedroom (ostensibly to help you dress), and now a key to your house. I can see so many things going wrong with this despite the potential value.

I’m probably more concerned about the flimsy lack of security in the area of internet of things (IoT) which could dip into these though than I am about what Amazon would/could do with them.

How to Steal a Million

Msr. Charles Bonnet, painter, art forger, conman
counter-scolding his daughter who has called him a fraud
in How to Steal a Million (1966)

 

Then, just a bit later in the film:

Msr. Charles Bonnet, painter, art forger, conman
ironically speaking to his daughter after forging and selling several major artworks
in How to Steal a Million (1966)