Hapgood

I’ve mentioned the Persona Project a few times in passing here. It was for me a major turning point in my life. I had been on a track to get a PhD. in linguistics, and, it being 1996, I ended getting an assistantship as a web developer, building the college’s first web site. At the Continue reading

From FiveThirtyEight, Arvind Narayanan on the expansion of Internet tracking and fingerprinting (h/t @hypervisible): There is research that shows that when people know they are being tracked and surveilled, they change their behavior. We lose our intellectual freedom. A variety of things we consider important for our civil liberties — say, marriage equality — are things that would Continue reading

This is a short note — the second I suppose — that follows up on a conversation I had yesterday with George Siemens and David Kernohan. In that conversation I stated I had a technique of using the web that helped to overcome bias rather than push us further back into it. It has, at Continue reading

This is a story about cognition and social media. But it begins with a bird. Our family has a bird, a green-cheek conure named Derp. His brain is about the size of an M & M (original, not peanut). Derp is a quick learner. You can say “Tidy up, Derp” and he’ll gather all the bottle Continue reading

The future belongs to architectures that move beyond the single-server, domain-based model towards federated solutions. More specifically, we’ll see a move from server-centered networks to content-centered networks. Both models will remain, but the pendulum will swing. You see this in SOLID’s decoupling of data from server applications, in the InterPlanetary File Systems use of a Continue reading

I read this heartbreaking story today about the U.S.’s current opioid epidemic. The surgeon general was having dinner with a friend, a cardiologist. Then this happened: “I was having dinner with him and I said, ‘Can you believe that we were taught that these opioid medications weren’t addictive in our training?’ ” Murthy told a Continue reading

We love using Slack for our communications here, and I think the idea of using Slack for classroom communication is sound. Some might say it’s not open enough, but I say pshaw, some conversations are better behind closed doors. Not every statement has to be a public stand. Twitter has been a seminar in that Continue reading

Some people think that notices like this are proof we should all be running our own instances of Kifi, blogging software, or whatnot. I’m lazy, and I don’t want to do that. I just want my data somewhere that I own, in a format any application can read. I don’t want to have to export Continue reading

My daughters get frustrated with trying to explain to friends what I do for a job. On a daily basis it looks a bit like faculty development, a bit like instructional design, a bit like strategic IT management. But of course, that’s not the part I talk about, despite it being the majority of my Continue reading

You can now upload and embed images in Wikity from the “catalog view”. The functionality puts the image file on your site and creates appropriate Markdown code for the embed. Captioning is enabled through the “title” functionality in Markdown. Continue reading