10 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. One of Murray’s most helpful advisers on American words was aGerman living in Boston, Carl Wilhelm Ernst. Ernst was a journalist, theeditor of the Beacon newspaper, and a former Lutheran minister who hadmoved to America when he was eighteen years old. Murray wrote to thejournalist in a panic when completing the entry for public school. ‘In workingat this, I overlooked the fact that we had nothing for the US use, and findmyself now almost stranded, and unable to complete the article.’ He wrote toErnst asking for illustrative quotations and for clarification on the Americansense of the word: ‘It is said to be synonymous with Common School. I donot know which of these is the official appellation, and which the popular, orwhether they are both so used. We should like to know this. The designationin England has a long and rather complicated history coming down from theL. publican schola, which is already used by Jerome of Quintilian.’Murray started the entry by defining the use of public school in Englandas ‘originally a grammar-school founded or endowed for the use or benefit ofthe public’ but more recently, in the nineteenth century, as ‘the old endowedgrammar-schools as have developed into large boarding-schools, drawingfrom the well-to-do classes of all parts of the country or of the empire’. Henoted that ‘the ancient endowed grammar-schools or colleges of Eton,Winchester, Westminster, Harrow, Rugby, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury’ aresometimes referred to as ‘the Seven Public Schools’. He contrasted this senseof public school with that in Scotland, the British colonies and the UnitedStates of America, as a school provided at the public expense, usually free.Above six American quotations spanning from 1644 to 1903, Murray added alengthy note, thanks to Ernst’s advice, ‘The term has been used in NewEngland and Pennsylvania from the 17th c., and has been adopted in all Statesof the American Union. An early synonym was “free school”, and a later onein some States, “common school” which is now however generally confined toa school of the lowest grade or “public elementary school”.’

      I recently heard someone talking about the differences in public vs. private schools in Britain and America as having opposite definitions.

  2. May 2022
    1. your Second Brain is a privateknowledge collection designed to serve a lifetime of learning andgrowth, not just a single use case

      Based on Tiago Forte's definition of a second brain the primary distinction from a commonplace book is solely that it is digital.

      Note here that he explicitly defines a second brain as being private. Historically commonplace books were private affairs though there are examples of them being shared from person to person as well as examples that have been printed.

  3. Apr 2022
    1. But it is more difficult in a world of manuscriptsthan in the era of printing to evaluate what constitutes a note—that is, a piece ofwriting not meant for circulation but for private use, say, as preparatory toward afinished work

      Based on this definition of a "note", one must wonder if my public notes here on Hypothes.is are then not notes as they are tacitly circulated publicly from the first use. However they are still specifically and distinctly preparatory towards some future finished work, I just haven't yet decided which ultimate work in which they'll appear.

  4. Jun 2021
    1. a principle I use is: If you have an accessor, use the accessor rather than the raw variable or mechanism it's hiding. The raw variable is the implementation, the accessor is the interface. Should I ignore the interface because I'm internal to the instance? I wouldn't if it was an attr_accessor.
    2. Also, Sandi Metz mentions this in POODR. As I recall, she also advocates wrapping bare instance variables in methods, even when they're only used internally. It helps avoid mad refactoring later.
    3. But suddenly I'm using a raw instance variable, which makes me twitch. I mean, if I needed to process has_sauce before setting at a future date, I'd potentially need to do a lot more refactoring than just overriding the accessor.
  5. Apr 2021
  6. Nov 2020
    1. The Object.getPrototypeOf() method returns the prototype (i.e. the value of the internal [[Prototype]] property) of the specified object.

      internal: [[Prototype]]

      Other times we see something used to indicate it is internal. In fact, this even supersedes proto__. So why did they use a different naming convention? Did they decide [[ ]] is a better naming convention?

  7. Nov 2018
    1. OER matters not because textbooks matter. OER matters because it highlights an example of how something central to our public missions, the transfer of our foundational disciplinary knowledge from one generation of scholars to the next, has been co-opted by private profit. And OER is not a solution, but a systemic shift from private to public architecture in how we deliver learning.

      I love this framing of OER as public infrastructure to facilitate the transfer of knowledge. I think it is not only generational, but also more broadly to the public. OER use is not limited to just students within our institutions, but are available freely and openly more broadly to the public. To anyone. I think we need to make that point more widely known. Every OER that is made freely available is making knowledge more open to not only students in our institutions, but to anyone, anywhere. It truly is "public" infrastructure.