Videos

📺 Learner Identities | YouTube

Watched Learner Identities by Dr. Mary KalantzisDr. Mary Kalantzis from YouTube
Human Diversity and Learner Transformation
I really like this video quite a bit. It definitely has an air of Big History to it, or at least Big History on the human scale portion of the timeline. I recognize and have written a bit about one of the smaller infographics from the video, though here it’s far too small to see what it is or what she’s referring to.

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.

📺 EDU 522 Daily Update: RSS and WordPress | YouTube

Watched EDU 522 Daily Update: RSS and WordPress from YouTube
I’ve recently learned that even searches on WordPress websites can have their own feeds. This way if the author doesn’t provide reliable tags or categories and they publish a lot (like I tend to), you can create custom RSS feed for any search term on their site using the format

http://example.com/?s=searchterm&feed=rss2

📺 RSS in Plain English | YouTube

Watched RSS in Plain English by Common Craft from YouTube

A 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

A nice (visual) overview of RSS from a technical perspective but small parts of it are dated including some of the currently available feed readers. I might recommend Inoreader and Feedly now instead.

📺 Quote Post-Kind on SemPress #IndieWeb Theme | YouTube

Watched Quote Post-Kind on SemPress #IndieWeb Theme by Greg McVerry from YouTube
I might have gone the step further and put the Dewey portion in the 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.

📺 Gene Editing: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver | HBO via YouTube

Watched Gene Editing: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver from HBO via YouTube

Scientists are developing new ways to alter the genetic code of living organisms. John Oliver explores the risks, rewards, and wolf-related hazards of gene editing.

📺 Another Web Bites the Dust | YouTube

Watched Another Web Bites the Dust by Alan Levine from YouTube
A salute to just 35 once vibrant free web sites that have bit the dust. Read their names (below) the next time someone raves about some site that will host your content for free. I'm prepping to do an updated version in 2018- please add dead webs to include in the comments.
An awesome little concept to highlight corporate silo site-deaths.

📺 Investigative Toolkit | Jon Udell

Watched Investigative Toolkit by Jon Udell from Jon Udell

This is great! The more citation of sources, the better. If I want to check those sources, though, I often wind up spending a lot of time searching within source articles to find passages cited implicitly but not explicitly. If those passages are marked using annotations, the method I’ll describe here makes that material available explicitly, in ways that streamline the reporter’s workflow and improve the reader’s experience.

📺 Open science: Michael Nielsen at TEDxWaterloo | YouTube

Watched Open science: Michael Nielsen at TEDxWaterloo by Michael NielsenMichael Nielsen from YouTube

Michael Nielsen is one of the pioneers of quantum computation. Together with Ike Chuang of MIT, he wrote the standard text in the field, a text which is now one of the twenty most highly cited physics books of all time. He is the author of more than fifty scientific papers, including invited contributions to Nature and Scientific American. His research contributions include involvement in one of the first quantum teleportation experiments, named as one of Science Magazine's Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Year for 1998. Michael was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of New Mexico, and has worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, as the Richard Chace Tolman Prize Fellow at Caltech, as Foundation Professor of Quantum Information Science at the University of Queensland, and as a Senior Faculty Member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Michael left academia to write a book about open science, and the radical change that online tools are causing in the way scientific discoveries are made.

Sadly this area of science hasn’t opened up as much as it likely should have in the intervening years. More scientists need to be a growing part of the IndieWeb movement and owning their own data, their content, and, yes, even their own publishing platforms. With even simple content management systems like WordPress researchers can actively practice academic samizdat to a much greater extent and take a lot of the centralized power away from the major journal and textbook publishing enterprises.

I can easily see open web technology like the Webmention spec opening up online scientific communication and citations drastically even to the point of quickly replacing tools like Altmetric. If major publishing wants something to do perhaps they could work on the archiving and aggregation portions?

What if one could publish a research paper or journal article on one’s own (or one’s lab’s) website? It could receive data via webmention about others who are bookmarking it, reading it, highlighting and annotating it. It could also accept webmention replies as part of a greater peer-review process–the equivalent of the researcher hosting their own pre-print server as well as their own personal journal and open lab notebook.

We need to help empower scientists to be the center of their own writing and publishing. For those interested, this might be a useful starting point: https://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Education