I'm going to try this. "I recently started looking at whether I could do federated wiki just on my laptop and not deal with a remote server. It doesn’t get me into the federation, per se, but it allows all the other benefits of federated wiki — drag-and-drop refactoring, quick idea linking, iterative note-taking, true hypertext thinking."
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]
One of the reasons why I could never be EdSurge's new business reporter is that I could never take the business-focused stance toward the 'education industry'. This article is a case in point. I do not use - and could not use the phrase "human capital". And sentences like this seem to me not just wrong but morally wrong: " Not only do we not have enough bodies to fill the open positions, we do not have enough experience and education to meet the implied knowledge and skills required by companies." The people here have been completely objectified to become "bodies" and :knowledge and skills". I can't live my life thinking of people that way, and articles that push that perspective are, to my mind, deeply suspect. (p.s. I think Audrey Watters would be perfect for the EdSurge beat, but doubt that EdSurge's political officers would ever allow her perspective to appear in their pages).
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I generally appreciate what Michael Caulfield has to say, but I haven't been in agreement with his approach to fake news. And I really dislike his characterization of critical thinking as "the thoughts and prayers of the educational industry." Now to be fair, he is talking about it being "wrongly applied". He writes, "Because the goal of disinformation is to capture attention, and critical thinking is deep attention.... whenever you give your attention to a bad actor, you allow them to steal your attention from better treatments of an issue." Well, true, but how are you supposed to know a priori who the bad actor is? Caulfield's approach to critical thinking is to identify (somehow) trustworthy sources. But real critical thinking involves looking at an issue from multiple perspectives, not a deep focus on a single source. So neither Caulfield's problem nor his solution applies here.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]
The story here is that "year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot." The question is, what (if anything) can we do about it? The author writes, "What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t 'truth,' but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be." This suggests that a means of finding truth without trust will not solve the problem of the fake internet. I'm not sure about that. I think truth is more foundational than trust.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]If I’m not careful when I introduce myself, “Jim McGee” gets heard as “Jimmy.” Curious as that was what I was called growing up. Outside of family and a few cousins, there were only two people who regularly called me “Jimmy” One was the director of the college theater group I was in. The other is a friend and colleague I worked with during my doctoral studies.
Although it’s a pretty common name, I take a certain perverse pride in laying claim to “jimmcgee” or “jmcgee” as a user name in places like gmail and twitter. It’s a marker of being an early adopter on multiple technology platforms.
You learn stuff by playing with it. But learning and play are suspect activities in most organizations. Outside of schools, the presumption is that you’ve learned what you need to know on someone else’s dime. Even in schools, you pay for the privilege of not knowing and being a learner.
This model works in a stable or slowly-evolving environment. There are places where you learn and places where you do. If you are in a doing place and the learning places are lagging, you might find it a good idea to create a private learning place to bridge the gap. But the idea of doing and learning remain separate.
I could argue that this is fundamentally wrong for all organizations and all times; that the separation of learning and doing is an artificial distinction that only works with the right confluence of factors and only for limited periods. We’re no longer in one of those periods.
We’ve been living through an extended period of accelerating change; it’s become an empty cliche. This is a cliche that you ignore at your peril. The half-life of what we know continues to shrink.
Half-life is a notion borrowed from nuclear physics. Radioactive elements and isotopes transform at a predictable rate; the transformation of Carbon-14 into Carbon-12, for example, is one of the facts that tell us that the world is more than 6,000 years old. The time it takes for half of the Carbon-14 in a sample to decay into Carbon-12 is the half-life and is a fixed and measurable rate.
Shifting back to knowledge and knowledge work, much of what we knew from our school days has decayed in similar fashion. By some estimates an engineering degree has a half-life of less than 10 years.
If you maintain the fiction that learning is something that occurs in learning places and is separate from doing, then you hire young computer scientists, move a handful into management, and replace the rest on a regular basis. A stupid management strategy, even it is appears to be a common one.
In work with a university research lab that was dealing with growing pains, I found the phrase “smart people doing smarter work” a helpful entry point toward a more effective response. There’s been a trend in knowledge intensive organizations toward hiring more people with Ph.D.s. At first glance, this can be viewed simply as seeking out people with more recent expert knowledge. The deeper truth is that a Ph.D. is someone who lives at the boundary of learning and doing; someone who understands that it is not, in fact, a boundary.
When I was a student, teachers were the people who had answers. If you had questions, you found the expert who had answers. When I was a consultant, I was an expert. When I reached the edge of what I knew, I looked for the next expert. Eventually, I reached a point where I ran out experts who knew. Since I was still operating from a learning and doing are separate things perspective, I went back to a learning place.
What I discovered was a community of fellow explorers who introduced me to a new practice, which was to say “I don’t know, let’s find out.” I was at the place with the half-life of knowledge problem was being created and attacked in parallel.
It’s certainly possible to treat this spot as just another place for experts. You can choose to be an expert at the edge, asking questions and passing answers back the chain to others who desire answers. What’s more interesting is to ask how to respond in a world where all of us operate closer to the edge of “I don’t know, let’s find out.” What if we looked to those already operating at the boundary between learning and doing as guides for traveling in this strange territory? What tools, practices, and habits of mind can we adopt to travel more effectively and safely in an environment where change is a feature not a bug?
The post You can’t separate learning and doing appeared first on McGee's Musings.
I made a good living as a ghostwriter in 2018. Is that who I am now? When I stopped working for a company and became independent three years ago, a prominent ghostwriting agency reached out to me. I told the owner, “I do not ghostwrite books for others.” But to keep an open mind, I … Continued
The post A year of ghostwriting appeared first on without bullshit.
Based on the heatmaps I drew earlier this month, I made a poster of two centuries of data on mortality rates in France for males and females. It turned out reasonably well, I think. I will probably get it blown up to a nice large size and put it up on the wall. I’ve had very good results with PhD Posters for work like this over the years, by the way.
Two centuries of French mortality rates
Here’s a PDF version if you have access to a color printer or plotter and would like a hard copy.
As before, the data are from mortality.org, and the plots were produced in R using ggplot. The code to make them is available on GitHub. The sidebar was added in Adobe Illustrator. And, of course, if you’d like to learn how to make, refine, and understand plots like this, consider buying my book, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction.
What follows is an introduction I wrote for an upcoming edited book on Rhizomatic Learning. It’s not really an introduction, or a preface or a prologue. Frankly I’m not sure what it is. It is certainly a story I’ve been wanting to tell. It’s also too long for a blog post, for which I apologize.
Citation: Grandal Ayala, M. y Peña Acuña, B. (eds.) (2018) Rhizomatic Learning. Madrid: ACCI.
It’s a funny word, rhizome. It is a stem of a plant that sends out shoots and roots from its nodes. Many of the plants in our gardens that we call weeds actually spread by this method. You end up with a ball of roots, random shoots popping up out of the ground here and there, and a plant that you can’t really control. It’s this clever quality, one imagines, that led to it being used by two french philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their somewhat peculiar book, A Thousand Plateaus.
I have developed courses, taught MOOCs and had many, many discussions teasing out the story of the rhizome for learning. I will avoid the temptation, however, to try and dive down the rabbit hole to explain the historical context of D&Gs philosophy, or the nuance of their somewhat curious masterpiece, A Thousand Plateaus. I am not the person to make this attempt. I came across the rhizome as its roots were spreading through my network; I came as an educator looking for answers to some of the questions that I had in the classroom. Many of you are likely coming to this book with a deeper understanding of the place of D&G in philosophy, and a more literal, perhaps, interpretation of the work of these too brave philosophers. This prologue may be frustrating for you, as my intention is not (nor has it ever been) to be true to the work that has gone before me. I have stolen from D&G, magpie-like, to help me build a story for my own learning.
I have also avoided defining rhizomatic learning. When we define something, particularly in writing, we necessarily exclude some of the nuance of the meaning. We leave out the chance that the definition can get better. We leave out another’s perspective. What I want to do is tell the story of rhizomatic learning from my perspective, my personal journey. To talk a little about what the concept has done for my teaching, my learning and my understanding of the world.
So I apologize for leaving you without a definition or a clear theory of rhizomatic learning, however useful these things could be. Theories, like definitions, help create a shared common language. As we reify language into chunks it creates a shorthand that allows us to communicate faster and more effectively. It also means that we are less likely to misunderstand each other as we have a shared ‘meaning’ for the words that we are using. I am not able to provide this certainty. But with this loss of certainty of meaning there is freedom. Feel free to take this into your own hands and draw the conclusions that work for you.
I was first introduced to the word ‘rhizome’ in 2004[note: by Bonnie Stewart]. I was approaching that 4-5 year mark as an educator and had been trying to understand why we shape the learning experience the way that we do. I was starting to accumulate a set of approaches that seemed to match my style. I had a reasonable expectation, walking into a class, that it probably wasn’t going to be a disaster. And I was reading. And that reading was starting to bother me. There was a discrepancy between some (many) of the things that I was reading and what seemed to be working in my class. I was clearly not doing what other people thought I was supposed to be doing.
Teaching in a graded environment is a true position of power. You get to decide, as a teacher, what someone needs to know and whether or not that person knows it. You get to set the measures of success. I had the same sense of imposter syndrome that many of us do in that situation. Who am I to be in a position to decide what someone else should know? What gave me the right to exercise the power that I had over my students? Sure, my grading matched my rubric, but I had just made up the rubric, how was that fair? Was I ready to accept the implications of failing a student?
All the questions I had, though, fell under the category of THE question of education. What does it mean to learn? I could see it in students in my classes, and had experienced it myself, but I was looking for a way to understand it… a definition of it that I could use. I was looking for a touchstone that I could use to justify the work I was doing.
I had just started experimenting with different technology supported learning methods at the same time. The use of those technologies seemed to have a fairly significant impact on what it was possible to do in my classrooms. The work that my students were doing suddenly became more diverse and more individualized, and, at the same time, I had lost some control over the teaching process. Had the learning changed? What impact does the technology that we use (think of technology broadly here, to include things like pens and books) have on what it means to learn? Was it better or worse that my students were handing me assignments that didn’t match what I had assigned? How could I assess them fairly?
The research I was reading indicated that students were ‘most successful’ when they had a clear expectation of what success could look like. Clear goals for each learning event combined with a perfectly structured class was a clear indication of someone who took the profession of education seriously. This is what it meant to be expert teacher. I struggled to match this perspective on expertise to the new experiences that were happening in my classroom. Telling someone what success looks like seemed like a poor way of empowering students to take control of their learning.
The textbooks that were a part of the day to day of my classroom supported this very structured, linear approach to what learning should be. It set out assignments that were connected to the content. There were answers to those assignments. Clear answers. Some of those answers were hidden in the back of the book and some were hidden in the magic book that was at my desk – The Teacher’s Copy. My job seemed to be to hide the answers to questions from my students and then work with students until they could guess them. The Internet was starting to make that a difficult game to win.
But all the time I was writing lesson plans (or feeling bad because I wasn’t writing them) I was thinking about the future students I would encounter. My own academic path and that of my peers had already shown me that learners are not an homogenous group; did the literature really expect me to accept that a one size fits all approach would be successful? How could I know what a student needed to know before I met them? Was there some canon of knowledge that I could simply go to and pick the right topics off a shelf that would be applicable to everyone? How could I decide, ahead of time, what success was going to look like for a student?
I was becoming more suspicious of that textbook. How much had the technology of print (that is, the ability to use a press to rapidly add words to a page) impacted what we thought learning could be? How much and how many of our practices were shaped because of the practical realities required for the writing, editing, printing, binding and shipping of books from one place to another? How many practices, by extension, were impacted by the process of knowledge access that happens in a typical school? In a print world, a classroom is limited by what I have in my head as a teacher, what are in the books I thought to order ahead of time, the books in my school and, if I’m teaching well, in the heads of my students.
This leaves you with little choice other than to plan ahead of time. If I need a book to be in my classroom on day 1, someone needs to chop down a tree, mash it into paper, throw a pile of ink on it and send it to me in a truck. All these things take time. I need to be completely prepared with ‘content’ before the classroom starts. I have to create the uncertainty in the classroom. I, as a teacher, control the uncertainty.
The Internet has changed that. Right here and now, with the ability to search I have access to an almost limitless amount of information. It may not be the best information, it may be controlled in ways that I don’t understand, but I can access it. And, furthermore, if the information is available everywhere, what does that mean to the content I use in my class?
This is when I came across the concept of the rhizome. It moved differently than the static models that I had been working with. It felt like a radical step away from the kinds of conversations I was having. It refused to be defined in any way that made sense to me. The thought suddenly occurred to me that the reason I’d been struggling to find a definition for learning was that it wasn’t the sort of thing that could be defined. I needed a story for what learning meant to me, and I had found it in a deeply troubling book. In the story of a plant that chooses its own paths, that is resilient and difficult to control. I have spent the last 13 years thinking about that story. How has technology impacted what we think learning can be? What is that learning?
The story starts in the law courts of the late Roman Republic. Two fantastically talented, obscenely vain men, who shared one talent that was vital for success in the last century BCE. They could talk. They could convince, cajole, overwhelm and persuade people through the power of their voices. They are Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Julius Caesar.
Cicero was a ‘new man’ from a small town outside of the city of Rome. His family was comfortable but not connected. New men very rarely made a splash in the complex web of Roman Republic politics. This one did though. He made an entire career out of his ability to use his voice first in the law courts and eventually in the senate house. He wrote books about how to give a speech in public. They focused on one thing – being able to go to the hearts of people. To bring them on-side. Once you’d accomplished this, there was no fact or figure that could work against you.
Caesar on the other hand was a scion of one of the oldest families in Rome – the Julian clan. His ancestry was traced back all the way to the founding families of the city and, according to family lore, he was the descendant of the Goddess Venus herself. While privileged in a way that Cicero was certainly not, he had to navigate the waters of conflicting allegiances, family marriages and Roman political alliances to make his way to notoriety. His constant companion was the ability to convince powerful figures to trust him as a politician, convince his soldiers to follow him as a general, to inspire the people of Rome to love him as their leader.
Another thing both of them had in common is that they studied under the same teacher; Apollonius of Rhodes. He ran a school of rhetoric that was widely reputed to be the best available in the Mediterranean. Students came from all over to become the best public speaker they could be. It was no casual journey to get to see the famous rhetorician. Travel at the time period was difficult and dangerous. Caesar was captured and ransomed by pirates on his journey to the island. While I would argue that mentorship from a master is going to rival if not beat any kind of learning that you are going to attempt – that privilege, clearly, is not easily won.
In 70BC, if you wanted to learn at the feet of the masters you had to be committed.
The learning Caesar and Cicero were trying to acquire was complex. They wanted to sway, to galvanize the hearts and minds of their listeners, to make them see things through their eyes. There’s no record of what Caesar learned in his time on the island, but for Cicero it was patience. He would throw too much of himself into his oratory, tire himself out, use up his voice. Apollonius taught him to be patient, to work his way towards a conclusion. Could he have learned this from a book? Would he have had the self-reflection to see where his flaws as a rhetorician laid and found a path to expertise. It’s possible. But these learning journeys are individual, different for each of us and impossible to prescribe for all. Or even for two. Learning of this type cannot scale. It is the kind of learning that can be given from one (or many) to one.
The second part of this story takes place in the year 1270. We are at the University of Paris reading an advertisement for another university on the other side of France in Toulouse. The flyer reads,
“Those who wish to scrutinize the bosom of nature to the inmost can hear the books of Aristotle which were forbidden at Paris.”
You can see that the role of the student in the learning process at a university in 1270 is to ‘hear’ the words of Aristotle. We lost poor Aristotle about 1500 years before the University of Toulouse existed, so we’re not only listening as a learning process, we’re also listening to someone who is no longer with us. We are looking at a perspective of the world that was thought and worked through a long time ago. Content that, as Plato suggested in the Phaedrus, is dead. It cannot be interacted with.
The predominant teaching method at this time is catechetical. It’s call and repeat. I might read a passage of Aristotle and then have the students repeat it to commit it to memory. And this made sense, given what was available to them at the time. One single book of Aristotle’s Physics (the book that was banned at Paris for making a variety of suggestions about the natural world that didn’t agree with the church’s perspectives on science) might be made from the skins of 200 animals. In a world before the printing press – in a world before paper – where we rarely allow students to touch books.
This means that a university like Paris has control over access to knowledge in a way that far supersedes anything you could do today. Certainly the ability to write down and record what Aristotle said is powerful, but the limitations of the technology have a profound impact on what we can do from a learning perspective. Certainly there are more people involved in the learning than there were in our Roman example, the advent of universities certainly means that more people can ‘learn’, but it means that the experience of learning is profoundly different.
When we are dealing with a dead argument that is delivered in the catechetical approach the tendency is to work towards remembering the argument rather than learning from it. The Monastic approach is to ‘lectura’ literally “to read” and hence we have lecture, an elevated position at the front of a room from which the learners listen to the reading from the lecturer. This was a far cry from the relationship between the master and learner on the Isle of Rhodes. Success is to repeat. Not much sense arguing with Aristotle about it, as he is not able to reply. It also means that the person reading the book at the front of the class that you are ‘hearing’ might not understand Aristotle the same way that Aristotle did. They may not understand it at all. If someone’s job is to read any number of books to you there is a much, much better chance that that person is not an expert on the subject that you are listening to. Your questions as a student, then, are more likely to be of the ‘What did Aristotle say?’ rather than ‘What did Aristotle mean?’
[NOTE: There is a giant piece in here that i didn’t get finished for the release of the book about how the Scholastics and the Humanists interact in all of this. Broadly speaking, the scholastics were certainly more interactive in their teaching style, but their epistemic foundation was still iconic Christian texts. A scholastic found things that seemed to contradict in extant religious texts, and then argued until they figured out why they didn’t exactly contradict. I can’t help but see what i think of as ‘fake’ project based learning in this. We want you to collaboratively explore your way to the solution that we have already decided you will find.
The humanists were a whole other bag of potatoes. I’m hoping to write a piece on them eventually, suffice it to say that the black death (circa 1350) left some people believing that there were other sources of knowledge than the christian texts. Also, for instance, artists were dissecting human cadavers at this point and discovering that Galen was wrong as well. The first glimpses that ‘knowing’ might be more than ‘knowing what came before’. see n. renaissance. ENDNOTE]
Lets jump forward a little more than 400 years to the little country of Switzerland, nestled in the middle of early modern Europe. The year is 1800 and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, having just failed as headmaster of an innovative school in the capital city, has a new dream. He wants to train an entire country how to read. Think about that. This is before there is a public school system. There are no teacher education programs. He had to come up with an approach that would allow regular people, with limited literacy, to teach others how to read, write and do basic arithmetic.
His solution was the textbook. We have moved on from having to slay a field full of animals in order to create a single book. We are now making books out of paper. And, even better, it doesn’t require a monk to spend half a year painstakingly writing out the book one word at a time. We have a printing press. We can decide what to put in a book, set it up on the press, and make 10000 identical copies.
At the same time, we are moving our student another step away from the content. We’re also requiring even less from the person who is facilitating the learning process. In Pestalozzi’s own words from “How Gertrude Teaches Her Children,”
“I assert definitely that a school-book is only good when an uninstructed schoolmaster can use it at need, [almost as well as an instructed and talented one].”
We’re a long way from our trip to see Apollonius at Rhodes who was evaluating the needs of every student in the terms of their journey. When we standardize not only the content but also the teaching, we’re increasingly forcing each student down the same road. We’re trading freedom for scale. Certainly the kind of one on one learning that was happening in Rome is still happening at this time, but learning, the system of learning, has become something different.
Pestalozzi’s dream is the one that most of us share. We want to be able to have a literate population. We don’t, most of us, want to limit literacy to a select group of people who won the financial birth lottery that gave them the resources and the free time to go about finding a mentor who can teach them as an individual. And we’ve expanded what we want that literacy to be. We want students to understand the world around them. How then, can we achieve the kind of student directed learning that allows Cicero to be the best that he can be and still allow everyone to do it? The experience Cicero had on the island is important, yes, but not as important as the decision to go there in the first place. It is, in a sense, the decision to learn that we are trying to teach. We are trying to enforce independence.
The influence of text, then, is profound. It allows us to scale the learning process, to allow more people to participate. In order for this to happen, however, we need to standardize first the content (in the case of the book) and then the process, in the case of the textbook. We’re creating paths in the smooth space of possibility. Because you have to kill a pile of cows. Because you have to arrange a pile of metal letters on a press. Because you have to plan months or years in advance of the learning process to assure that the content arrives, it creates a pattern of what learning is going to look like.
Those paths were a necessity of the technology that we had. They allowed Pestalozzi to try to teach a whole country to read. They allowed a professor from to stand up in front of a number of students and read the words of someone long dead. I think that we started to believe that those paths in the sand WERE learning. The goal was not for a learner to become something that they might want to become. The goal of learning in a textbook world was for the learner to become a follower of paths.
I am not interested in training a world of path followers. I know that anyone who is only going to learn when I’m watching them is not learning very often. They are limited by what I know, yes, but they are also limited by their translation of what they think I want them to know. This is a poor preparation for a life of learning. Or, to put it in more D&G friendly terms, I am looking to equip a nomad who can wander across a smooth uncertain space. I am looking to help support path makers. I can see the need for striation, for tracks, given the earlier technologies from our story, but I think the internet changes that. For good and for ill.
I used to think that what it meant to learn actually changed along with the technology. It seemed a dramatic thing to claim, but I now see that it takes away from the story. The real story here is that as we’ve needed more and more people to be able to read and write, our conceptions of what it means to be educated have changed along with it. The journey, the coming to know of the learner, remains the same.
In a catechetical classroom, we reward obedience. Obedience to the process of call and repeat and a strict adherence to the word that has been said. In a textbook classroom, we reward getting through the process. Through the path. If you follow the trail that we have set for you, and acknowledge the sign posts, you have succeeded. The passivity of the learner in our education system can be seen, at least partially, as a result of the technologies we were forced to use to scale learning.
And yet, under all this, is the learner. The learner is still on their own journey, even if they are being forced onto a striated path. They are coming to the structured event with a different background, different habits, different aptitudes and desires. However much they’ve taken a copy of what you are trying to imprint, that copy is never going to be exact. They are still gravitating to the things that make sense to them, adding those things to what they know. They are still building their own map.
I try to keep this story in mind when I try to understand what the Internet can do to my learning journey. I use it to interrogate my actions. It is the first time where the learning event can regularly contain something not planned or prepared for by the teacher, and not brought in advance by the student. It could, possibly, allow the student to allow the underground journey, that self-directed journey, to be reflected in the actual classroom.
I’ve come to believe that under that layer of technology rhizomatic learning was always happening. We can see pieces of it in the structures of our own knowledge. Follow the citations in an academic article back to their ‘source’ and you’ll find a rhizomatic web of knowing. It is self-supporting and contradictory. Always uncertain. If learning is this personal map making journey, how can we use the technology we now have to support this in our classrooms?
My job as a teacher is to create smooth space. To create an uncertain space where students have a chance to be ready to create their own map. To build an ecology within which students can grow, wander, break off and reconnect. A place where they can access the voices of the past and present and use them to learn. If my students can learn when they are uncertain, they’ll be prepared to answer questions that I cannot. And, even better, ask questions that I might not think to ask.
One of the editors of this book calls A Thousand Plateaus a walking book. It’s a book that you carry around with you with the intention of reading it, but it tends to just come with you in your bag. It requires a certain frame of mind to dig into it, a frame of mind that doesn’t occur just every day. It surprises you. It comes upon you. You need to have the book ready for when those moments occur. It is, in a sense, a good story for learning itself.
In a post on the company blog I announced that it’s now possible to use the Hypothesis extension in the Brave browser. That’s great news for Hypothesis. It’s awkward, after all, to be an open-source non-profit software company whose product is “best viewed in” Chrome. A Firefox/Hypothesis extension has been in the works for quite a while, but the devil’s in the details. Although Firefox supports WebExtensions, our extension has to be ported to Firefox, it isn’t plug-and-play. Thanks to Brave’s new ability to install unmodified Chrome extensions directly from the Chrome web store, Hypothesis can now plug into a powerful alternative browser. That’s a huge win for Hypothesis, and also for me personally since I’m no longer tethered to Chrome in my daily work.
Another powerful alternative is forthcoming. Microsoft’s successor to Edge will (like Brave) be built on Chromium, the open-source engine of Google’s Chrome. The demise of EdgeHTML represents a loss of genetic diversity, and that’s unfortunate. Still, it’s a huge investment to maintain an independent implementation of a browser engine, and I think Microsoft made the right pragmatic call. I’m now hoping that the Chromium ecosystem will support speciation at a higher level in the stack. Ever since my first experiments with Greasemonkey I’ve been wowed by what browser extensions can do, and eager for standardization to unlock that potential. It feels like we may finally be getting there.
Brave’s support for Chrome extensions matters to me because I work on a Chrome extension. But Brave’s approach to privacy matters to me for deeper reasons. In a 2003 InfoWorld article I discussed Peter Wayner’s seminal book Translucent Databases, which explores ways to build information systems that work without requiring the operators to have full access to users’ data. The recipes in the book point to a design principle of least knowledge.
Surveillance capitalism knows way too much about us. Is that a necessary tradeoff for the powerful conveniences it delivers? It’s easy to assume so, but we haven’t really tried serious alternatives yet. That’s why this tweet made my day. “We ourselves do not know user identities or how donations might link via user,” wrote Brendan Eich, Brave’s founder. “We don’t want to know.”
We don’t want to know!
That’s the principle of least knowledge in action. Brave is deploying it in service of a mission to detoxify the relationship between web content and advertising. Will the proposed mechanisms work? We’ll see. If you’re curious, I recommend Brendan Eich’s interview with Eric Knorr. The first half of the interview is a deep dive into JavaScript, the second half unpacks Brave’s business model. However that model turns out, I’m grateful to see a real test of the principle. We need examples of publishing and social media services that succeed not as adversaries who monetize our data but rather as providers who deliver convenience at a reasonable price we’re happy to pay.
My hunch is that we’ll find ways to build profitable least-knowledge services once we start to really try. Successful examples will provide a carrot, but there’s also a stick. Surveillance data is toxic stuff, risky to monetize because it always spills. It’s a liability that regulators — and perhaps also insurers — will increasingly make explicit.
Don’t be evil? How about can’t be evil? That’s a design principle worth exploring.
Visualization continues to mature and develop into a medium. There's less focus on visualization the tool and more focus on how to use the tools. That is a good thing. Read More
This past November, Slow Car Fast Home took two Blix Vika+ electric bikes on an adventure from Portland, Oregon to Santa Cruz, California. Danielle and Tommy follow a "tiny-living" lifestyle meaning all their belongings fit inside their RV! As Danielle explained to us, "We knew we didn’t have space inside our tiny RV for full-size bicycles, and bike racks were out of the question for numerous reasons." Thus, when Slow Car Fast Home found out about the folding Vika+ they knew they had to test them out and see how they would fit into their lifestyle.
Slow Car Fast Home found the compact size and ease of folding the Vika+ to be one of the biggest benefits of these electric bikes! The Blix bikes were the perfect size to fit in their "... super tiny RV shower. We stacked them one on top of each other and they didn’t budge while traveling!"
Similarly, to get the Blix Vika+ ready for riding, it only takes a few simple steps. Danielle and Tommy were thrilled as they "tend to sporadically take off on adventures," and "being able to pull the bikes out of the RV and quickly flip them to the riding position" was a huge plus for them.
Speaking of adventures, without electric bikes, it was hard for Danielle and Tommy to sometimes escape their home as it is also their car. The Blix Vika+ electric bikes brought "a whole other side of ease to our travels." They "can park and not have to worry about running around with [their] home connected to us the entire time."
Another perk discussed by Danielle and Tommy is the ability of one battery charge taking you a long way! With one charge, they "explored Astoria, OR, the Avenue of the Giants, and a day in San Francisco!"
While the Vika+ did improve their travel and ability to explore, Danielle and Tommy were most impressed by how the Blix bikes reduced their carbon footprint. As they write, "While traveling with the Vika+ e-bikes we had an alternative option to explore that saved us money on gas, multiple parking lot fees, and even have days that we didn’t need to drive the RV at all." As an alternative means of transportation, the Vika+ reduced their gas use!
We would like to thank Slow Car Fast Home for taking the time to partner up with Blix Bikes and take the Blix Vika+ on a West Coast adventure! Follow them on Instagram for more updates on their tiny-lifestyle!
Find more information on the tech specs of the Blix Vika+ here
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It’s going to be a banner year for new and upgraded parks in Vancouver, according to this Courier article:
Except for one thing. See if you can find the word ‘cycling’ anywhere in there. (Let’s save you the time: you won’t.)
Or check out the design for the new park at Smithe and Richards:
See the bikes: two on the City sidewalk, one on the adjacent City bikelane. Given that this is a small park, that’s not too surprising – but it is indicative. When looking at the failure of the Board of Parks and Recreation to actually incorporate, improve or even acknowledge the woeful condition or absence of safe and sufficient cycling facilities, the conclusion is reinforced by their capital plan: the “new era of park and facilities development” as described by Tina Mack, manager of park development, includes pretty much everything except cycling. One gets the sense that the ‘Recreation’ in their name doesn’t involve anything with wheels (except the parking lots for the community centres).
This still stands as the Parks Board approach to cycling facilities:
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The ancient CP railway track continues to change into one of Vancouver’s treasures.
While there a few days ago, I was reminded that the Arbutus Greenway became the subject of a classic battle between Vancouver’s citizens and a small band of preservationists, who wanted this 42-acre strip of Vancouver’s land to remain a private park for local able-bodied walkers — exclusivity defined.
That noisy clash of wills seems to me now like a preview in miniature of the upcoming one over the vast acreage of Vancouver’s land now exclusively zoned for low density. A.K.A. the “City Plan”. Blogger and pundit fodder for many years, I should think.
This trip, I saw a series of light towers — sporting solar panels — located on a darkish part of the Greenway.
And, as usual, lots more people were on it than the last time I was there. I’m intrigued to see what will happen when we transition from temporary to permanent Greenway.
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And these EU nationals, tech savvy as they are, are filled with joyous wonder at the ease with which they can apply online to stay in the UK. Their wonder is really quite similar to the wonder they showed when they applied for a sustainable technology grant in Canada. pic.twitter.com/lKW6580uzE
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Liberals think Russia flipped the election by buying $100k in Facebook ads, but the fact that Wall Street gives millions to their favorite candidate is just a normal functioning democracy.
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How will we pay for Universal Healthcare? I don't know, maybe the same way as:
Canada
England
Chile
Sweden
Cuba
Portugal
Italy
Iceland
Germany
France
Denmark
Austria
Australia
Algeria
New Zealand
Taiwan
Mexico
Thailand
India
Brazil
Switzerland
Costa Rica
Peru
Egypt
Spain
&
Rwanda
existentialcoms
on Friday, December 28th, 2018 2:06amI zoomed all over a small section of Golden Gate Park today, the gardens near the De Young and Cal Academy, through some tunnels, down into a ravine full of redwoods near the Rose Garden, and on many winding unpaved paths in the Botanical Gardens. What a blast! I felt so free! Hills, deep gravel, deep wood chips, mud, wet soggy grass…. my giant tires got me through all of that.
Little winding paths are my favorite, where you have lots of choices and can’t tell where you’re going to end up!
I haven’t been in trees in a park for way too long, and have been imagining it for months – ever since the summer and my last trip to Golden Gate Park. So, this was very satisfying. A gorgeous winter afternoon, no fog, warm enough for no jacket when I was in the sun.
This is very nice. Like WSL on Windows 10, it lets you run unmodified Linux binaries, and uses the built-in macOS hypervisor to do so.
It’s not as useful as WSL on Windows (given that most of what I run also has native macOS ports), but might be a good way to do cross-compilation for exotic stuff that require Linux-only tools.
Incidentally, the reverse (running Darwin binaries on Linux) is still a work in progress, but it can apparently run part of the Xcode toolchain already, which might be useful for automated CI/CD pipelines.
Cupertino-based computing giant Apple will begin assembling high-end iPhone models — like the iPhone X — in India in 2019, according to a source who spoke with Reuters.
Apple currently relies on Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer with factories in China, Brazil, Malaysia and other countries around the world, to assemble its iPhone devices.
The majority of Apple’s iPhones are manufactured in Foxconn’s Longhua Science and Technology Park in Shenzhen, China.
According to an unidentified source who spoke with Reuters, however, Apple will soon use Foxconn’s factory in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu to manufacture higher-end iPhones.
Reuters reported that Foxconn currently makes Xiaomi phones in India, while Apple already uses Taiwanese Wistron Corporation’s facilities in Bengaluru to manufacturer the company’s lower-end iPhone SE and iPhone 6S devices.
Apple’s decision to manufacture iPhones in India likely stems from the ramifications of the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China, started by President Donald Trump earlier this year.
Foxconn has previously acknowledged that the dispute between the U.S. and China has hindered the company’s ability to affordably continue its operations.
Source: Reuters
The post Apple will manufacture high-end iPhones in India in 2019: Reuters appeared first on MobileSyrup.
A Chrome OS bug tracker discovered by 9to5Google suggests that Mountain View search giant Google is interested in bringing adoptable storage to Chrome OS and Chromebooks.
Adoptable storage allows users to set up SD cards and other external storage sources as internal device storage options.
Rather than walling off users to simply allow the use of SD cards for photos, music and videos, adoptable storage allows users to install applications and other system files on an SD card for greater file storage.
According to the December 21st, 2018 bug tracker post, Google doesn’t currently “have a concrete plan for implementing this.”
The issue appears to be one of storage safety.
“Android’s recommendation … is to implement adoptable storage in a long-term stable location since accidentally disconnecting them can cause data loss/corruption, but the majority of Chromebooks don’t have such a location unfortunately,” reads an excerpt from the December 21st post written by project manager yusukes@chromium.org.
While many Chromebooks allow users to insert SD cards and microSD cards to expand onboard storage, not all Chromebooks have something like a flap to ensure that SD cards and external storage hardware aren’t dislodged during regular use.
Source: Chromium bug tracker Via: 9to5Google
The post Google might bring adoptable storage to Chrome OS, Chromebooks appeared first on MobileSyrup.
While we here in Canada wait for Samsung’s Android 9 Pie build to roll out, details on what to expect from the software update are starting to filter out thanks to Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ owners who already have the update installed on their devices.
According to SamMobile, the final build of Samsung’s 9.0 build doesn’t include Android’s adoptable storage feature.
It had appeared Samsung was preparing to finally add support for the feature, which allows Android users to use an SD card for the dedicated storage of smartphone apps, files and media, when it started beta testing Android 9 Pie.
While Samsung doesn’t appear to have included adoptable storage in its latest version of Android, that’s not to say the company won’t add the feature in later Android 9 Pie builds or even later versions of Android.
Google added adoptable storage to Android back in 6.0 Marshmallow.
Samsung started the rollout of its official Android 9 Pie build earlier this month. The update hasn’t made its way to Canada yet. In fact, neither Rogers nor Telus list the update as part of their software roadmaps.
Source: SamMobile
The post Samsung’s final Android 9 Pie build skips on adoptable storage appeared first on MobileSyrup.
In an admission that the internet isn’t always great on touch-based devices, Google is adding a ‘Request tablet site’ option to Chrome.
Google’s senior product manager for Chrome OS, Kan Liu, confirmed in an interview with Android Police that Google’s aware not all sites work well on touchscreens.
Further, Liu said an upcoming release of Chrome OS tablets and touch-enabled Chromebooks would allow users to force a ‘tablet mode’ rendering.
While Liu didn’t elaborate on which Chrome OS release would get the new feature, About Chromebooks found a flag to turn it on in the new Chrome OS Dev channel update.
In Chrome OS Dev version 72, you can navigate to ‘chrome://flags’ and search for the ‘#enable-request-tablet-site’ flag. Once you’ve enabled the flag and restarted your Chromebook, the three-dot overflow menu will contain the new ‘Request tablet site’ option.
It’s also worth noting that this Chrome OS flag isn’t exactly new, but may not have been widely available before now.
Regardless, Pixel Slate users — and other touchscreen Chromebook users — will likely welcome the new feature. If you’re using your device in tablet mode, desktop websites can be a common frustration. Having the option to force things to be touch-friendly should help in that regard.
Source: Android Police, About Chromebooks
The post Chrome OS gets option to request tablet sites in Dev channel version 72 appeared first on MobileSyrup.
Catherine generously gave me a copy of Making Books, from the London Centre for Book Arts, for Christmas. Many handmade books are sure to follow.
I love that they have a project called A6 that accepts submissions of self-published “artist books, zines and publications,” with the only constraint being they must be A6-sized.
A6 is my favourite of the ISO paper sizes: I love my A6 notebooks and the pouches I carry them about in; I went as far as equipping myself with an A6-sized water bottle this fall.
Making Books has a very clear diagram of how the ISO paper size system works:
Each size from A0 to A7, when folded in half, becomes the next size down: fold an A6 in half and you get an A7 signature. It’s brilliant, and it’s a shame that, when we converted to the metric system in Canada in the 1970s, we didn’t go all the way and adopt this sizing system as well (the province of Ontario tried, but ultimately gave in; when I was in grade 13 in high school the photocopiers were filled with A4 paper).
I’m in Regina, Saskatchewan with family for the holidays. Someone said “Let’s go to a Christmas Eve carol service” and five of us did that. We went to Lakeview United, where “United” signifies the United Church of Canada, the biggest Protestant denomination up here. It was uplifting and pleasant and sort of sad. Disclosure: I’m not Christian at all; but still.
As you can see, the congregation (for the 8PM December 24th service) was sparse and elderly. The statistics are remorseless: Christianity is in decline. The proportion of Canadians who attend church weekly is not far from 10%.
This surprises me, if only because the Church’s tools are still very strong. The voices raised in Christmas hymns were breathtaking (the crowd, while small, sang well), the Gospel’s words telling the Christmas story were beautiful, and Sue Breisch, the Minister, was eloquent and welcoming, broadcasting love and empathy. Here are some of her sermons.
The building is really fine in a Sixties kind of way, its main hall comfortable, with big comfy rocking chairs and coffee tables at the back.
Maybe it’s as simple as this: Even if you don’t actively disbelieve (as I do) the Christian narrative, religion has lost its urgency, and as lives are increasingly filled by the Net and the pressures of late capitalism, there are ways to fill Sunday mornings that feel more important.
Having said that, I enjoyed the words and music intensely — lack of faith didn’t get in the way — and recommend doing this sort of thing from time to time. I also think it might be good for you. And maybe I’m wrong, maybe Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Light, and you’ll end up saving your soul from eternal torment.
I ran across two great examples of humility by Nobel Prize-winning economists in recent conversations with Tyler Cowen. When asked, "Should China and Japan move to romanized script?", Paul Romer said:
I basically don't know the answer to that question. But I'll use that as a way to talk about something else ...
Romer could have speculated or pontificated; instead, he acknowledged that he didn't know the answer and pivoted the conversation to a related topic he had thought about (reforming spelling in English, for which he offered an interesting computational solution). By shifting the topic, Romer added value to the conversation without pretending that any answer he could give to the original question would have more value than as speculation.
A couple of months ago, Cowen sat with Paul Krugman. When asked whether he would consider a "single land tax" as a way to encourage a more active and more equitable economy, Krugman responded:
I just haven't done my homework on that.
... and left it there. To his credit, Cowen did not press for an uninformed answer; he moved on to another question.
I love the attitude that Krugman and Romer adopt and really like Krugman's specific answer, which echoed his response to another question earlier in the conversation. We need more people answering questions this way, more often and in more circumstances.
Such restraint is probably even more important in the case of Nobel laureates. If Romer and Klugman choose to speculate on a topic, a lot of people will pay attention, even if it is a topic they know little about. We might learn something from their speculations, but we might also forget that they are only uninformed speculation.
I think what I like best about these answers is the example that Romer and Klugman set for the rest of us: It's okay to say, "I don't know." If you have not done the homework needed to offer an informed answer, it's often best to say so and move on to something you're better prepared to discuss.
The spirit of the season is where you find it. And this Christmas Labyrinth was at Olympic Village, just north of the giant sparrows.
The creator called it his Christmas present — a memory for you to carry through the year ahead. (Pix below).
Click to view slideshow.
When I took a year of Computing Science in 1980 it was still considered engineering and so I got a year's worth of engineering education (and one computing science course). It was actually pretty interesting, and I appreciated the exposure to mechanical, electrical, and other forms on engineering, as well as the chemistry and physics that underlie them. The 'engineering' mentioned in this article is something very different. Yes, engineering presupposes an approach based on precision and design. But 'brainstorming' isn't inherent to engineering, nor are 'redesign' and 'critique'. This article is yet another one of those articles applying fancy words to teachers in an effort to help them feel good about the things they're already doing.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]It’s 2018, and I’ve still not found anything that helps me think as clearly as federated wiki. At the same time, running a web server of your own is still, in 2018, a royal pain. Case in point: recently a series of credit card breaches forced a series of changes in my credit card number (two breaches in one year, hooray). And that ended up wiping out my Digital Ocean account as it silently failed the monthly renewals. Personal cyberinfrastructure is a drag, man.
But such is life. So I recently started looking at whether I could do federated wiki just on my laptop and not deal with a remote server. It doesn’t get me into the federation, per se, but it allows all the other benefits of federated wiki — drag-and-drop refactoring, quick idea linking, iterative note-taking, true hypertext thinking.
It turns out to be really easy (I mean as things go with this stuff). I’ll go into detail more below, but here are the steps:
npm install -g wiki Step one: Download Node.js for Windows. Install.
Step two: Open a command window and type: npm install -g wiki
It’s installed!
To start your wiki go to a command prompt and type:
wiki -p 80 --security_type friends --cookieSecret 'REPLACE-THIS-SECRET' You may need to give node some permissions. I won’t advise you on that. But you definitely don’t need to give public networks access to your server if you don’t want.
Go to your localhost. You’ll get the start page.
When you first visit your wiki it will be in unclaimed, read-only mode, and the bottom of the interface will look like this (though probably not have 47 pages):
When you click that lock icon, it will create a random username and go to unlocked position.
Once you do that you can click on the word “wiki” and now it will move out of read-only into edit mode:
You’ll know it’s in edit mode because you’ll see the edit history icons (sometimes colloquially referred to as ‘chiclets’) at the bottom.
And — that’s it. You’re done. Wiki away.
You’ll need to launch the server from a command window each time you want to use it, but if you’re familiar with Windows you can write a bat file and put it in your startup folder.
(Incidentally, this isn’t a tutorial on how to use federated wiki. I’m tired, frankly, of trying to sell it to people who want to know why it takes more than fifteen minutes to learn. I don’t teach people it anymore because people have weird expectations and it wastes too much of my time trying to get past them. But if you’re one of the people who has made the jump, you know this — I just want to help you do it locally on your laptop.)
You don’t need to know where files live on your computer, but sometimes it is useful. For instance, you might want to back up your pages, or reset a username. Here’s how you can do that.
In the single user mode we used above, wiki pages will be in a .wiki directory under your user directory. For instance, my directory is C:\Users\mcaulfield\.wiki\pages. They are simple json files, and can be backed up and zipped. You can also drop json files from other wiki instances here, though you’ll have to delete the sitemap.json file to reindex (more on that below).
For ownership and indexing issues there is a status directory under the .wiki directory (e.g. C:\Users\mcaulfield\.wiki\status). This has two important files in it. One is owner.json, which maintains login information (initially this will not be there — it’s written when you claim it). The other is your sitemap, which has a list of all pages and recent updates on them. Deleting the sitemap is useful when you want to regenerate it after manually uploading new files.
To change your username, you can edit the owner.json file. Change the name property.
If something goes wrong and you want to reinitiate the claim process, you can delete the owner.json file.
If you clear your cookies and hence loose your claim (i.e. are logged out), you can pull the secret from the json and enter it when prompted. It’s OK to change it to something simple and more password-like that you can remember.
The node files of your wiki installation will be in your AppData roaming directory under npm, e.g. C:\Users\mcaulfield\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\wiki. There’s not an real reason to touch these files.
This is only for federated wiki geeks, but it is completely possible to run a small personal desktop farm, where you can run multiple wiki sites in what are essentially separate notebooks. Just go into your hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) and add localhost aliases:
# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost
127.0.0.1 disinfo
127.0.0.1 journal
127.0.0.1 papersonwiki
127.0.0.1 sandbox
127.0.0.1 teachersguide
127.0.0.1 wikipediawomen
127.0.0.1 opioidcrisis
127.0.0.1 raceinamericaLaunch in farm mode (-f) and type these words into your browser omnibar. Each will maintain a separate wiki instance. If you want to be able to search across all instances, use the –autoseed flag. Note that you’ll have to go through the minimal claim process with each one (two clicks, shown above).
If you want to push to a remote server, you can. There’s a couple ways to do this.
First, there’s a flag in wiki that allows you to point to a different directory for pages. So you can point that to a mapped drive or Dropbox or whatever on your laptop, and then point a remote server to that same directory.
Alternatively you could do a periodic rsync to the server. Windows 10 has bash native to it, so you can install that, reach your files through Bash for Windows’s /mnt/c/ mapping, and push them up that way.
In each case, you probably want to delete the sitemap.json and sitemap.xml to trigger a regeneration.
Interestingly, you could also use this scheme (I think) for joint generation of a public wiki.
IIRC, there is also a way to drag and drop json export files into wiki instances.
Finally, you can share files with people by zipping them up and emailing them or providing them as a zipped download. They in turn can drop them into their own federated wiki instance to work with. I’ve been thinking a lot about this model, which is very memex like — I make a notebook of my notes on something, post it up, you pull it into your machine. The provenance gets messy at scale, but among a group of people in a subfield that are being more descriptive in their practice than rhetorical this might work out fine.
Using federated wiki again reminds me once again of what wiki means, in an etymological sense. It means quick.
What all other non-federated wiki systems lack is not just federation. They lack quickness, largely because they are designed towards novices and trade away possibilities for fluid authorship in exchange for making the first 15 minutes of use easier.
So while it may seem weird to run a federated wiki server on a laptop in a way that makes federation less available, if you’ve learned the method of multi-pane wiki it’s not really weird at all, because every note taking system you’ve used besides federated wiki is unbearably slow, clunky, and burdensome. Federated wiki, in the hands of someone that has mastered it, works at the speed of thought. And it does that whether your in the federation or not. So here’s to a very wiki New Year.
It’s the end of December, and we’re about to enjoy the company of dear friends to bring in the new year. This means it is time for my annual year in review posting, the ‘Tadaa!’ list.
Eight years ago I started writing end-of-year blogposts listing the things that happened that year that gave me a feeling of accomplishment, that make me say ‘Tadaa!’. (See the 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010 editions). I am always moving forwards to the next thing as soon as something is finished, and that often means I forget to celebrate or even acknowledge things during the year. Sometimes I forget things completely. Although I have worked on improving that sense of awareness over the past few years, it remains a good way to reflect on the past 12 months. So, here’s this year’s Tadaa!-list:
All in all it was a rather unhurried year, with more time for reflection about next and future steps. I worked 1728 hours, which averages out to about 36,5 per week worked. This is not yet getting closer to the 4 day work weeks I actually have, compared to last year, but at least stable.
I’ve read 69 books, at a steady pace. All fiction, except for a handful. I’m looking to create the space to start reading more non-fiction. That likely requires a separate approach.
Elmine gave me an amazing sculpture for my birthday, called “Strange Bird Totem”. The artist Jacqueline Schäfer’s work is described as “showing a positive vibe for life in a complex modern society“. That sort of feels like a great motto for the next year. Ever onwards!
