Handing over data, often quite thoughtlessly, has become par for the course – in education and in society more generally. Although privacy experts have urged parents and educators to be more proactive about protecting children’s data and privacy) – while using Pokémon Go and other data-hungry apps – we now live in a culture of surveillance, where data collection and data extraction have become normalized.
When you feel included and engaged, do you do a better job? Do you think teams in which people work well together produce much better results? Have you noticed the best ideas often come from unexpected sources? Do you want to work at the top of your intelligence and give the same opportunity to others? If YES, we have found this is the kind of organization and community that people want to be part of. AND, Liberating Structures help make it happen.
Enable Cross Team Slack Chat with Blockspring – Blockspring
Blockspring shares an office space in San Francisco with the awesome Watsi team. Both of our teams use Slack for internal communication, but what we really wanted was a shared channel to discuss office issues, plan lunch outings and post cat facts. Since Slack doesn't support creating a shared channel across teams we decided this would be another great dogfooding opportunity. In just a few minutes we created a function on Blockspring that connects two team's incoming and outgoing webhooks. We built the fuction to be cloned and used by other teams like yours. Follow the steps in this post to get your teams chatting for free and without needing to set up any servers.
Truthy Lies and Surreal Truths: A Plea - Hybrid Pedagogy
But this problem is bigger than the proliferation of misinformation in today’s media landscape. Sure, captioning that Venezuelan video as Los Angeles could have been an honest mistake. While I think that’s true for those retweeting it, I find it hard to believe that whoever originally shared it made an honest mistake, given the architecture and the chant, not to mention all the Venezuelan flags! I think it more likely that the originator of this misinformation has something insidious in mind. Something that takes advantage of how easy it is today to pass along media uncritically.
Mapping the learning and teaching | e-Learning Stuff
During the recent Jisc Digital Leadership Programme, we looked at mapping our use of social networking tools using the concept of Visitors and Residents. We were lucky to have the influential Donna Lanclos and Dave White supporting us. I like how the mapping exercise makes you consider how you are using various tools and what needs to happen to change that map, how do you become more resident when using a tool such as Twitter for example. Or how do you start using a tool which is currently not on your map, such as a professional blog? The key thing I like to remind people about when using the mapping that this is a continuum and not a distinction between two groups. Your personal VandR map is not, and should not be a static thing. The mapping changes as new tools are introduced, old ones retire and your role and behaviours change.
Interactive Communications and Simulations (University of Michigan)
The Interactive Communications & Simulations Group at the University of Michigan has served the K-16 community for over 30 years. We support a dynamic assortment of innovative web-based programs harnessing the power of simulation gaming, activism and service learning, and social networking for educational purposes. Our working model of the Internet is not just as a passive repository for information, but as an interactive space where new kinds of learning can occur. Thousands of students from over 400 public and private schools in 36 American states and 25 countries overseas have been involved in ICS exercises. In networking together far-flung classes of students and their teachers, ICS creates "global classrooms" which may be comprised of hundreds of students, but which are manageable because of the structure of the exercises. ICS programs are not distance-learning courses in the traditional sense of the term. Rather, they are collaborative projects defined by extended interactions between students at different schools, thematic content in a variety of subject areas, opportunities for personal engagement through character-play, self-expression or social activism, and (often) involvement of university-level mentors under the supervision of the project directors. Each project involves meaningful, often intensive, communication among K-12 students, mentors, and facilitators. ICS activities use custom-built environments specific to each project's goals.
Over the past few weeks I have had the pleasure of co-authoring a conversation about web annotation for the “disrupted” issue of the Journal of Media Practice. My co-author is none other than my dear friend and colleague Jeremy Dean, Director of Education at Hypothesis. Our conversation about the practices and politics of web annotation is intended to be more than a two-way exchange. We have performed a scholarly dialogue and invited interpretation of that conversation through the modern social media practice of web annotation. One challenge is whether – or how – this conversation becomes generative of traditional scholarship, such as a more linear, peer-reviewed article. We recognize that this distributed conversation may in the end be too ethereal or too noisy, testing our ability to subsequently and usefully capture and represent a layered, versioned textual experience as more conventional academic prose. We embrace the emergent and unpredictable quality of web annotation as an opportunity to remark upon and disrupt scholarly communication and knowledge production.
How I learned to Stop Worrying about Digital Natives and love V&R | Donna Lanclos–The Anthropologist in the Stacks
Those of you familiar with me on Twitter know that I’ve got frequent rants against Digital Natives in my feed, and I’ve been indulging in such rants more often lately, as there’s been a rash of people on the internet and in person invoking that particular trope. I’m not going to spend time here debunking the Digital Natives thing, I’ve done actual work that helps deconstruct it, and that offers an alternative.
Today, we’re pleased to announce the launch of Firefox Focus – a free, fast and easy to use private browser for iOS. We live in an age where too many users have lost trust and lack meaningful controls over their digital lives. For some users, it seems as though your web activities can follow you everywhere – across devices, across accounts. To make matters worse, the web can often feel cluttered. That’s why we are introducing Firefox Focus. For the times when you don’t want to leave a record on your phone. You may be looking for information that in certain situations is sensitive – searches for engagement rings, flights to Las Vegas or expensive cigars, for example. And sometimes you just want a super simple, super fast Web experience – no tabs, no menus, no pop-ups. Firefox Focus gives you just that.
The Game Changers Programme is an open six-week opportunity to explore the role of Game Design Thinking in fostering creative problem solving, cross-disciplinary design collaboration and gaming literacy. Or, in plain words, we will help you in trying your hand at making your own games (board games, card games, digital games, you name it)! The Programme is a gamified six-week programme involving weekly stages (missions) with sub-tasks (quests) to help you self-evaluate your progress as a game designer, and generate your first “Design Diary” in the form of a blog. The Programme includes open sessions with industry experts (workshops, speakers, etc.) throughout the process. A variety of support materials will be made available via this website, our dedicated Game Changers online resource, encouraging an ethos of sharing, collaboration and remixing.
It is by establishing this concept of language that I begin to construct an understanding of photography as a process of visual storytelling in which images are words, series of images are sentences and paragraphs, and bodies of work become completed or evolving stories. The importance of narrative within photography is then aligned to a sense of narrative already learned through more traditional study of language construction and presentation. The successful single image can of course come from a series of images just as a beautifully written paragraph or sentence can come from a chapter, but the pre-conceived idea of what constitutes a successful image will then be seen as a demonstration of technical proficiency or given aesthetic implementation of course learning created to meet a marking matrix.
Mail-in-a-Box lets you become your own mail service provider in a few easy steps. It’s sort of like making your own gmail, but one you control from top to bottom. Technically, Mail-in-a-Box turns a fresh cloud computer into a working mail server. But you don’t need to be a technology expert to set it up.
‘Towards Openness - how can we be safe in online learning?’ is a collaborative workshop that will take place locally at OEB16 with Christian Friedrich and virtually on Twitter with me. You can find the workshop description on Online Educa's website This workshop is designed as a collaborative session where you are invited to consider the opportunities and risks of open online teaching and learning catalysed by provocations that revolve around openness, ownership, digital identity, privacy and security. Conversations will take place in locally and online that will be facilitated by Chrstian and me. Key moments from the discussions will be captured to help Towards Openness build cases to policy makers to support openness and ownership and to provide the resources needed to enable rich, safe and ethical learning for 21st century learners.
Isaac Newton, like Albert Einstein, is a quintessential symbol of the human intellect and its ability to decode the secrets of nature. Newton's fundamental contributions to science include the quantification of gravitational attraction, the discovery that white light is actually a mixture of immutable spectral colors, and the formulation of the calculus. Yet there is another, more mysterious side to Newton that is imperfectly known, a realm of activity that spanned some thirty years of his life, although he kept it largely hidden from his contemporaries and colleagues. We refer to Newton's involvement in the discipline of alchemy, or as it was often called in seventeenth-century England, "chymistry." Newton wrote and transcribed about a million words on the subject of alchemy. Newton's alchemical manuscripts include a rich and diverse set of document types, including laboratory notebooks, indices of alchemical substances, and Newton's transcriptions from other sources.
Networks connect computers to each other. But how do people use those connections? Information systems like the Web let us share content such as text, pictures, or music. The Web running over the Internet has become our global commons, absorbing older media—from video to books and telephone calls—and transforming how we work, buy, and stay in touch.
Telegram launches a new anonymous blogging platform
Messaging platform Telegram has launched Telegraph, a new tool for publishing stories on the Web without having to register for an account. It’s like the most lightweight blogging platform ever. Just visit telegra.ph, add a title and your name, and you’re off. You can add text and format it with Markdown, and even embed images from your computer, as well as tweets and videos from YouTube and Vimeo.
Creating a WordPress Theme From Static HTML - Envato Tuts+ Code Tutorials
Experienced frontend developers who had built sites using HTML and CSS, and found it easiest to take their existing HTML files and convert them to a theme. Two of the people I spoke to were lecturers or teachers, and told me that this is the approach they use with students. So in this series I'm going to show you how to do just that.
We’ve created this technobabble generator to help writers characterful technical jargon to their science fiction works. Does a complicated piece of technology need fixing on your spaceship? Don’t know what that piece of technology is? Try out the technobabble generator and see if its randomly generated nonsense fits the bill.
The Digital Visitor and Resident (V&R) model provides a framework to depict how user preference and habit motivates engagement with technology and the web. V&R is commonly described as a continuum, with two modes of online engagement at either end, making a separation between different approaches to engagement. People operating in Visitor mode have a defined goal or task, and select an appropriate online tool to meet their needs as they arise.[1] For example, using a smartphone to search the internet for directions to a local bookstore, thus finding a particular piece of information online and then going offline to complete the task. There will be little in terms of social visibility or trace when online in Visitor mode. People operating in Resident mode are online to connect to, or to be with, other people. For example, posting to the wall in Facebook, tweeting, blogging, or posting comments on blogs. The web supports the projection of their identity and facilitates relationships. In other words, Residents live a percentage of their lives online. Unlike the Visitor mode, there will be online visibility and presence when in Resident mode.[2] It is very common for individuals to engage online in a mixture of Visitor and Resident modes depending on what they are trying to achieve.
Masonry is a JavaScript grid layout library. It works by placing elements in optimal position based on available vertical space, sort of like a mason fitting stones in a wall. You’ve probably seen it in use all over the Internet.
Create a Slack Bot That Privately Greets New Users in 5 Easy Steps – Medium
A simple step-by-step guide to creating a Slack Bot that sends new users a customizable private Slack welcome message. (easy setup for non-technical people)
This year, instead of avoiding online new sites, I thought I'd do something fun for the team I work with, the team at Slack. I decided to build something that wold allow the team to play the 1979 text adventure game Zork, inside of Slack. Needless to say, it was a very fun game to play collaboratively. Commands were handled separately then chat, so discussions could happen along side the adventure. and anyone could type a command at any time. Team mates would hop in the #zork channel when they had a few minutes, read what had happened since their last visit, and maybe make a few moves of their own. It was entertaining to watch unfold.
Trizbort is a simple tool which can be used to create maps for interactive fiction. Over the years a number of styles have evolved for interactive fiction mapping. Trizbort focuses on creating maps in only one of these styles, as popularised by Infocom: labelled boxes for rooms, with lines connecting them.
Quest - Write text adventure games and interactive stories
Quest lets you make interactive story games. Text adventure games like Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Gamebooks like the Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books. You don't need to know how to program. All you need is a story to tell. Your game can be played anywhere. In a web browser, downloaded to a PC, or turned into an app
Squiffy - A simple way to write interactive fiction
Squiffy is a tool for creating interactive fiction - that is, multiple choice games that focus on text and story. Players navigate through the game or story by clicking links. Sometimes these kinds of games or stories are known as gamebooks. Squiffy is free and open source. It creates HTML and JavaScript, so you can upload it to your own website, or you can upload your games for free to textadventures.co.uk. You can also turn your game into an app using PhoneGap.
Owners of the iPhone — especially the 16 GB variety — know this scenario all too well: you try to take a photo or download an app and receive this dreaded message: “There is not enough available storage.” Naturally, the first instinct to delete photos or apps to free up space for more stuff. But a new trick has surfaced that can free up iPhone storage space without requiring users to delete a thing. This iPhone trick appeared on Reddit last month (hat tip to Cnet), and it requires users to rent a movie. Sort of.
