There’s been some real gems this week in Stephen Downe’s shares or found through constant cross linking within articles he shared. Check out Stephen’s Vision statement – now THAT’s a vision. It’s what I want too!
Can we have that please? I beg of you. My head hurts the way the internet is going. It’s getting me angry.
Well it seems it does for a couple of people.
Who shall I start with?
Nobody Knows Anything
Reading this post written in 2009, it was hard not to disagree with author, Dave Pollard. For added effect, I read it out loud in an angry voice. The only difference is that I came to this conclusion a lot earlier than the author but unlike the author, I naively believed in something idealistic.
Surely it can’t be possible?
Surely there HAS to be someone not interested in profit above all else?
Nope. What was I thinking!
These ‘leaders’ hang out with other people just like themselves, and their groupthink persuades them that they’re right, they’re important, that what they say and do and decide really matters.
Almost all mergers and acquisitions actually destroy value — their only real purpose is to eliminate competition. The “competitive advantage” and “economies of scale” that big organizations lay claim to are a fiction. Their success is really mostly due to massive, incessant propaganda aimed at dumbed-down customers, subsidies, discounts and favours bought with political donations, the crushing of competition and innovation through legal intimidation and offshoring, cornering and squandering precious natural resources and treating the natural environment as a free dumping ground.
Just highlight the whole article.
Scale. What a dirty word.
Edtech: Who the &*#% Are You?
Again another share from Stephen Downes but I chuckled through this one. I always did like how Alan Levine wrote. In this he shares his frustration of Edtech over edtech.
Look at the capitalisation of those words.
It reminds me of the corporate learning and development teams to distinguish between the learning and development that someone does who takes charge of their own personal learning (little l and d, cute l and d, not important l and d) versus the big mother of a D for L&D Learning and Development, the function that sits in corporates responsible for the rollout of eye wateringly boring courses sitting on Learning Management Systems that no one accesses except for once or twice a year to do their mandatory compliance training. Big L& D, important L&D, more valuable to management L&D.
What I liked about his post is that he uses some movie examples of what happens when people sell themselves and their work to Satan. It reminds me of the rant that Jaron Lanier had in his book You Are Not a Gadget (2010) about file sharing. (I’ve got a video book review coming on this one – standby).
French Writing Tips
One of the things I need to practice more is to write in French. This week, the gods introduced me to a colleague who is a French speaker. On Yammer (our enterprise social network), we wrote nothing about books but it was an entire conversation in French much to the organisation’s amusement. Our company has its HQ in Amsterdam and offices in Australia and India. French, unfortunately is not a language they speak. Oh well. Here’s some ways to learn French writing tips.
https://www.talkinfrench.com/french-writing-tips/
Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod
Trying to, trying to (within reason). I just want to do my own thing.
Pulled Away from Blogs
Leaving Twitter or Facebook means starting over.
This is another site, Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece that was shared by Stephen Downes and I spent a considerable time exploring because it goes into detail about microblogging.
It got me down the rabbit hole of terms I had never heard of before. Bridgy Fed? IndieWeb?
This is an area I’d like to learn more as it looks like there’s people out there taking charge of their own content and syndicating it however, it looks like you need to have experience in coding which hurt my head a bit. I made a mental note to park this and come back to it with fresh eyes.
Although check this out. He had a kickstarter for his idea and look at how popular it was! (Part of me thinks I’m really late to the party on this). I downloaded the Micro.blog app onto my phone and set up an account to have a bit of a play.
However, the fact that I have this website means I don’t need the microblog. Part of me shudders with dread with having to share it on anything that looks like a tweet stream at the moment in case I get sucked into that vortex again.
I need to just have complete time out from others for the moment.
Hope For the Future
Hope is not in technology. Hope is in our humanity.
Audrey Watters
In this post, Audrey shares her presentation Hope for the Future to Digifest2022 and cautions against indifference at this time. Although her audience is educators, much of this presentation resonates for me too because I do feel that organisations haven’t learned the lessons nor are they aspirational. I’d like to make a difference in my work with organisations to help them see the value of people sharing knowledge and building communities – and making a difference but when your work is all about the bottom line, how much it can be scaled and commoditised, you tend to wander “What’s it all for? What’s the point?” “Why do I bother?”
Willpower. A will to change your own pedagogical practices. A will to change your institutions. Will is necessary, politically. I hope that you will consider how to tie that will to action, to collective action. You are not alone. I believe that you came to education too because you believe in the future. You must to work in this field. Educators engage in the profound process and practice of engaging minds in change — intellectual transformation. Education straddles the past — “the curriculum” — and the future — individually and societally. Education is about what we learn today so we can be better tomorrow. Education is a practice of hope. You cannot be indifferent about the future and be an educator.
Something Lighthearted
80’s Glam French Rebellion
I had to share this one because Indochine was mentioned. I love Indochine and written about them – and their songs here on this blog in Learning French through Songs. The 80s were my formative teen years and it’s pretty safe to say that musically, I haven’t left them. I’m still listening (even more so) of the songs of that era – just extending it now to listening to other songs of the 80s that were in countries like the UK and France.
What the heck, let’s add Indochine here now. Turn the volume up.
This is How You Pack
Carla is pretty fabulous if you ask me. If she saw how I packed a suitcase, she’d die. I’m scratching my head how she’s going to turn out with all those prints. This coming from someone who can pack a back pack for months in Europe simply by taking the minimum in everything. My brain does not compute when I see this.
Thanks for the links Helen, especially to Manton Reece’s site on micro-blogging. I’m a fan at least in principle of the indieweb approach, especially the idea of the main home for my content being on a site that I control.
However the nature of going in a direction that is perpendicular to where the big platforms and surveillance capitalists want us is that you end up having to craft a lot of your own solutions, and it really does help if you can turn your hand to a bit of code.
So far I have webmentions going in and out to/from my site, so at least for other people in the indieweb world that’s a direct peer-to-peer mechanism to “converse between sites”. Toying with the idea of POSSE, and that might be the most obvious use for a micro.blog account, but you need a paid account for that, and even if it is only $5/month, I’m trying to resist the inexorable increase in how many subs I run!
And this is why I need to learn how to do this. If you can direct me to some simple ways to do this or resources, I’d appreciate it.
Maybe in hindsight, I could have done some basic automation that got my tweets to flow back to my blog but I simply didn’t know this. I knew there were automations such as using IFTT or Zapier and even Power Automate to have blogs go out to tweets and other social media as I’ve used those but not the other way around.
For now though, I’m not going back on social media. Instead I’ll continue writing on here and just dabble with different things. If people get any value from it, they know where to find me and I’d happily connect and give them my email or Zoom call with them. Looking at the micro blog costs, I did wonder what additional benefit it would provide over and above having everything in WordPress? One of the things I did spend money on though is upgrading the security of this site.
Given you run on WordPress I reckon you could find plugins to post to twitter, and probably to process webmentions too. If you have the latter then Bridgy would post back replies to any tweets,
Ton would probably be a a good person to ask as he uses WordPress and is very into indieweb stuff.
I shifted my stuff off WordPress onto Hugo a few years ago because I was bored with being hacked, but that does mean I need to do a bit more technical plumbing to make those things work 🙂
Thanks for this Julian, I’ve deleted my Twitter account permanently and don’t plan to get back in there any day soon. Well, part of me just doesn’t want to be sucked into that vortex again so it ‘feels’ like my blogging is just that. It just ‘sits there’. I’m not actively cross posting it in any spaces and I’m deliberating whether I actually need to – for now. For now, I’m okay just to lay low for a bit, do my own exploring, writing, deliberating and pontificating, just go with the flow. If anyone desperately needs anything, they can just come to me and find me through Google. I know most won’t – and that’s okay. The ones who do find me mean they really want to connect. I’m using this as a filtering mechanism…
I’ve got a Mastodon account (but hardly used) and now just dabbling with Micro blog (thanks to Ton’s work that somehow got me to find this but still scratching my head if this micro blog is an actual blog or similar to Twitter?) I need to explore it more….
Thanks for sending through the POSSE link. I’ll read it and check it out in detail.