Category Archives: enviable stuff

Talking about it isn’t good enough / But quoting from it at least demonstrates / The virtue of an art that knows its mind. // Seamus Heaney : Squarings

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The Web itself is pretty special – Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a global hyperlinked information system. A system that was – ideally at least – openly available and accessible to everyone, designed for the purpose of sharing information and collaborating on knowledge-building endeavors. That purpose was not, at the outset, commercial. The technologies were not, at the outset, proprietary.

Source: Why ‘A Domain of One’s Own’ Matters (For the Future of Knowledge)

Nice concise post about why the web is important as compared to silos on the web.

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     And that’s the Web. That’s your domain. You cultivate ideas there – quite carefully, no doubt, because others might pop by for a think. But also because it’s your space for a think.

 

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Google says it can’t trust our self-hosted AMP pages enough to pre-render them. But they ask for a lot of trust from us. We’re supposed to trust Google to cache and host copies of our pages. We’re supposed to trust Google to provide some mechanism to users to get at the original canonical URL. I’d like to see trust work both ways.

Source: Adactio: Journal—In AMP we trust

Reading above my pay grade again.

More about Google’s AMP stuff here: Google AMP is good for mobile web users – but what about publishers? | Media | The Guardian

One of the things it does is present your content quickly without all the javascript that slows pages down, but it also seems to hijack the ULR and give the material a google one.

Given Schools should teach pupils how to spot ‘fake news’ – BBC News, it might make understanding and evaluating content even harder.

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Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

from: Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media | Politics | The Guardian

Carole Cadwalladr’s article in today’s Observer, is both fascinating and frightening. The technology used by Cambridge Analytics is incredibly  powerful the use it has ben put too worrying. Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s comms director in the quote above doesn’t have a Facebook account quoted in the same article:

It is creepy! It’s really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.

Featured image on this post created with a wee AppleScript Makes auto complete google search gifs.

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I’ve seen this linked a few times recently, finally clicked.

– […] we may keep, use and share your personal information with companies connected with Instagram. This information includes your name, email address, school, where you live, pictures, phone number, your likes and dislikes, where you go, who your friends are, how often you use Instagram, and any other personal information we find such as your birthday or who you are chatting with, including in private messages (DMs).

from: A lawyer rewrote Instagram’s terms of service for kids. Now you can understand all of the private data you and your teen are giving up to social media — Quartz

I’ll be sharing this with my pupils soon.

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Intervision, the 70s Soviet answer to the Eurovision Song Contest, was judge by electricity grid voting: “those watching at home had to turn their lights on when they liked a song and off when they didn’t, with data from the electricity network then being used to allocate points.” [Nick Heady] (Fluxx have been working with National Grid on several projects this year)

Just one of 52 things I learned in 2016 – Fluxx Studio Notes – Medium found via kottke

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maybe, in concert with an emphasis on making and collaborating and bug reporting and embracing other values of the open web, individuals can help reorient the cultural attitude toward technology away from entanglement and back to a place of enlightenment.

The Age of Entanglement – The Atlantic

Interesting Article. More grist for the ‘why we need to teach digital literacy and curiosity’ mill via @livedtime

Featured image Qsquare quantum pseudo-telepathy from flickr
Creative Commons — Attribution 2.0 Generic — CC BY 2.0

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Now forget about the algorithm that brought this here and focus instead on the card. Every decision on this card is maximized to keep you on Facebook. So, for example, my name is bold and blue and prominent. The headline is also prominent, and Facebook pulls the description from the page so that the Facebook reader can read a summary of an article without going to the article.

Facebook Broke Democracy, but the Fix Is Harder Than People Realize. | Hapgood

A really interesting post lots to think about. Unlike Facebook I’d encourage you to read it

I’ve been wondering about what software choices do to us, and our thinking. These sort of considerations are missing from the from the conversation among technology enthusiasts in school education(or I’ve missed them).

I am not sure I am knowledgeable enough to even start teasing this out. Certainly there seems to be more immediate problems in our digital learning bubble (access and skills for two). But if we make choices for ourself and learners with out even considering the effects and affordances of software design we may end up drifting in the wrong direction.

Bonus link: Only Microsoft Could Make Teams

 

featured image: screenshot shot somewhat messed about with snapseed.

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  1. They comment on other people’s posts.
  2. They like other people’s posts.
  3. They share them.
  4. They…

from: What do nice Internet users do?

Click through to see all 12 points from Dave Winer who should know, having blogged as long than anyone.

From a education PoV good advice for reading and responding to pupils post, but applicable everywhere.

Featured image: Nice to be important by Michelle Grewe on Flickr shared with a Creative Commons — CC0 1.0 Universal license, which was nice.