624 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. Now if you Google that term, how many sites in the top 50 will you find just offering a clear and balanced treatment of what it is, what the recent trends are with it, and what seems to be driving the trends? The answer is none. The closest you’ll find is an article from something called the Encyclopedia of Earth which talks about the environmental economics of local energy subsidies. Everything else is either journal articles or blog posts making an argument about local subsidies. Replying to someone. Building rapport with their audience. Making a specific point about a specific policy. Embedded in specific conversations, specific contexts.
  2. Mar 2024
    1. there’s something really magical about the information density of visuals and graphics, which I would argue is based on the fact that humans are deeply embodied in visual creatures before we were linguistic textural creatures. And so it’s kind of pulling on a much richer, kind of higher bandwidth information channel for us.
  3. Feb 2024
    1. As thehistorian Jean Leclercq, himself a Benedictine monk, puts it, ‘in theMiddle Ages, one generally read by speaking with one’s lips, at leastin a whisper, and consequently hearing the phrases that the eyessee’.6

      quoted section from:<br /> [au moyen âge, on lit généralement en pronançant avec les lèvres, au moins à voix basse, par conséquent en entendant les phrases que les yeux voient.] Jean Leclercq, Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Âge, 2nd edn (Paris: Cerf, 1963), p. 72.

      What connection, if any, is there to the muscle memory of movement while speaking/reading along with sound/hearing to remembering what we read? Is there research on this? Implications for orality and memory?

    1. Less discussed than these broader cultural trends over which educators have little control are the major changes in reading pedagogy that have occurred in recent decades—some motivated by the ever-increasing demand to “teach to the test” and some by fads coming out of schools of education. In the latter category is the widely discussed decline in phonics education in favor of the “balanced literacy” approach advocated by education expert Lucy Calkins (who has more recently come to accept the need for more phonics instruction). I started to see the results of this ill-advised change several years ago, when students abruptly stopped attempting to sound out unfamiliar words and instead paused until they recognized the whole word as a unit. (In a recent class session, a smart, capable student was caught short by the word circumstances when reading a text out loud.) The result of this vibes-based literacy is that students never attain genuine fluency in reading. Even aside from the impact of smartphones, their experience of reading is constantly interrupted by their intentionally cultivated inability to process unfamiliar words.

      Vibe-based literacy

      Ouch! That is a pretty damming label.

  4. Jan 2024
    1. My guess is that it was unintentional and the result of sloppy note-taking practices that did not clearly mark original and borrowed ideas.

      Jillian Hess' guess for the origin of King's plagiarism.

      It's also possible that he came from a much more oral facing cultural upbringing rather than a dyed-in-the-wool academic one which focused on attribution.

    1. I learned to read with a Superman comic book.

      The narrator's introduction to reading is tied to a Superman comic book

    1. Literacy is usually defined as the ability to read and write, or the ability to use language to read, write, listen, and speak.

      Is this all that counts as literacy?

  5. johnhalbrooks.substack.com johnhalbrooks.substack.com
    1. This image resonates with the earliest description of an English poet, which we find in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in the year 731. Bede, a prolific monk and scholar from the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria, provides an account of a certain Caedmon, an illiterate brother at the abbey at Whitby, who is visited by God and taught to sing beautiful poetry. Caedmon remains an oral poet, but his literate brothers write down his poetry for him.
    2. To illustrate this liminal space between the oral and the literate, here is an illustration from the Vespasian Psalter, a manuscript from the late eighth century, that depicts King David singing the Psalms: David is accompanying himself with a harp, and there are horn players and a couple of people apparently clapping along with the beat. But there are also two scribes behind him, who are writing down his song. Here we have a representation of a culture in a transitional stage between oral and literate transmission of poetry—the oral performance of a poem and the written transmission of the same poem are both present in the image.

    1. The good part is that voices that  might not have been heard can be   heard in the Internet environment.  The not-so-good thing is that some   voices that you don't want to hear are also  amplified, including truths and untruths. So we're being asked in some sense to  pay for the powerful tool that we have   available by using our brains to think  critically about the content that we see.

      Combating disinformation with literacy

      For better or for worse—whether the driver was an idealistic view of the world or the effect of an experimental network that got bigger than anyone could imagine—the internet is a permissive technology. The intelligence of the network is built into the edges...the center core routes packets of data without understanding the contents. I think Cerf is arguing here that the evaluation of content is something best done at the edge, too...in the minds of the internet participants.

  6. Dec 2023
    1. In my book Technology’s Child: Digital Media’s Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up, I explore how the design of platforms and the way people engage with those designs helps to shape the cultures that emerge on different social media platforms. I propose three layers for understanding this process.
  7. Nov 2023
    1. How to Apply the SAMR Model with Ruben Puentedura, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQTx2UQQvbU.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQTx2UQQvbU

      Enhancement:<br /> - Substitution: Tech acts as a direct tool substitute with no functional improvement - Augmentation: Tech acts as a direct tool substitute with functional improvement

      Transformation - Modification: Tech allows for significant task redesign - Redefinition: Tech allows for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable

  8. Oct 2023
    1. Take Alter's treatment of the cycle of stories in which the first two matriarchs, Sarah and Rebekah, conspire against elder sons for the benefit of younger ones. Sarah insists that Abraham drive Ishmael, his firstborn, and Ishmael's mother, Hagar, into the desert to die, to protect the inheritance of Sarah's son, Isaac. Rebekah tells her son Jacob to trick his father, the now elderly Isaac, into giving him a blessing rightfully owed to Esau, Jacob's ever-so-slightly older twin brother. The matriarchs' behavior is indefensible, yet God defends it. He instructs Abraham to do as Sarah says, and after Jacob takes flight from an enraged Esau God comes to Jacob in a dream, blesses him, and tells him that he, too, like Abraham and Isaac before him, will father a great nation.Alter doesn't try to explain away the paradox of a moral God sanctioning immoral acts. Instead he lets the Bible convey the seriousness of the problem. When Abraham balks at abandoning Ishmael and Hagar, God commands, "Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her voice." Rebekah, while instructing Jacob on how to dress like Esau so as to steal his blessing, echoes God's phrase -- listen to my voice" -- not once but twice in an effort to reassure him. As we read on in Alter's translation, we realize that the word "voice" ("kol" in Hebrew) is one of his "key words," that if we could only manage to keep track of all the ways it is used it would unlock new worlds of meaning. In the story of Hagar and Ishmael, God's messenger will tell Hagar that God will save them because he has heard the voice of the crying boy. And the all but blind Isaac will recognize the sound of Jacob's voice, so that although his younger son stands before him with his arms covered in goatskin (to make them as hairy as Esau's), and has even put on his brother's clothes (to smell more like a hunter), Isaac nearly grasps the deceit being perpetrated against him.

      Something fascinating here with respect to orality and associative memory in ancient texts at the border of literacy.

      What do others have to say about the use of "key words" with respect to storytelling and orality with respect to associative memory.

      The highlighted portion is an interesting example.

      What do other examples look like? How common might they be? What ought we call them?

    1. facilitate learning that uses the technology to foster student-directed inquiry

      Emphasis on the importance of student learning via technology becoming self-directed in this age - connection to digital/media literacy.

    2. There is no such thing as “illiterate”, there are just certain things in life that people are more or less literate about.

      Is this true?

    3. Literacy is the ability to be able to be aware and cognizant of the task you are doing or the situation you are in. Being literate is the ability to critically analyze texts and interpret them to have meaning.

      Hopefully by the end their definition has changed a bit to include other values within literacy.

    4. Literacy is the ability to be able to be aware and cognizant of the task you are doing or the situation you are in. Being literate is the ability to critically analyze texts and interpret them to have meaning.

      Is this all that is included in literacy?

  9. Sep 2023
    1. I used to give oral examinations at St John's in Chicago and one of the one of the reasons why an oral examination is so much better than the written examination is the professor can never in a written examination say to the student what did you mean by these words 00:47:05 but in oral examination a student often repeats words he's read in the book and you're saying now Mr Jones what you just said is exactly what Hobbs said or what Darwin or 00:47:18 lock said now tell me in your own words what Locke or Hobbes or Darwin meant and then the student has remembered the words perfectly can't tell you in his own words no and you know he has he has noticed of the sentence right he's just 00:47:30 memorized or sometimes he actually can do it and then you say that's very good Mr Jones but now give me a concrete example of it yeah and he failed to do that guy those are the two tests I've always used to be sure the student really grasps the meaning of the key 00:47:42 sentence

      Mortimer Adler gave oral examinations at St. Johns in which he would often ask a student to restate the ideas of writers in their own words and then ask for a concrete example of that idea. Being able to do these two things is a solid way of indicating that one fully understands an idea.

      Adler and Van Doren querying each other demonstrate this once or twice in the video.

      related: - https://hypothes.is/a/rh1M5vdEEeut4pOOF7OYNA - https://hypothes.is/a/iV5MwjivEe23zyebtBagfw

      Where does this method sit with respect to the Feynman Technique? Does this appear in the 1940 edition of Adler's book and thus predate it all?

    1. Where are the synoptic studies of mythology? (In the way the Bible has been pulled apart.) Naturally we're missing lots of versions to be able to compare, but synoptic studies of Greek and Roman mythology would potentially have some interesting things to say about the oral traditions of Jesus which passed down his story before they were written down decades (or more) following his death.

    1. Gould, Jessica. “Teachers College, Columbia U. Dissolves Program behind Literacy Curriculum Used in NYC Public Schools.” Gothamist, September 8, 2023. https://gothamist.com/news/columbia-university-dissolves-program-behind-literacy-curriculum-used-in-nyc-public-schools.

      The Teachers College of Columbia University has shut down the Lucy Calkins Units of Study literacy program.

      Missing from the story is more emphasis on not only the social costs, which they touch on, but the tremendous financial (sunk) cost to the system by not only adopting it but enriching Calkins and the institution (in a position of trust) which benefitted from having sold it.

      link to: https://hypothes.is/a/eicbpgSKEe6vc0fPdIm05w

    1. Your success in reading it is determined by the extent to which you receive everything the writer intended to com­municate.

      The difficult thing to pick apart here is the writer's intention and the reader's reception and base of knowledge.

      In particular a lot of imaginative literature is based on having a common level of shared context to get a potentially wider set of references and implied meanings which are almost never apparent in a surface reading. As a result literature may use phrases from other unmentioned sources which the author has read/knows, but which the reader is unaware. Those who read Western literature without any grounding in the stories within the Bible will often obviously be left out of the conversation which is happening, but which they won't know exists.

      Indigenous knowledge bases have this same feature despite the fact that they're based on orality instead of literacy.

  10. Aug 2023
    1. Behind these tariff walls the professors who hadmany of the great writers and much of the liberal arts intheir charge contentedly sat, oblivious of the fact that theywere depriving the rising generation of an important part oftheir cultural heritage and the training needed to understandit, and oblivious also of the fact that they were deprivingthemselves of the reason for their existence.

      It can be easy to deprive a generation of important pieces of their cultural heritage by omitting any focus on it.

      • shiboleth
      • philology
      • disinterest
      • overwhelm

      Compare the loss of classical education and cultural heritage by "internal decay" as described by Hutchins in the early 1900s and the forced loss of cultural heritage of Indigenous Americans by the U.S. Government in roughly the same period by re-education and stamping out Indigenous language.

      Certainly one was loss through lack of exposure, but the other was outright erasure due to the natures of orality and literacy.

  11. Jul 2023
  12. Jun 2023
    1. For children stuck on a difficult word, Professor Calkins said little about sounding-out and recommended a word-guessing method, sometimes called three-cueing. This practice is one of the most controversial legacies of balanced literacy. It directs children’s attention away from the only reliable source of information for reading a word: letters.

      source for claim in final sentence?

    2. Unlike many developed countries, the United States lacks a national curriculum or teacher-training standards. Local policies change constantly, as governors, school boards, mayors and superintendents flow in and out of jobs.

      Many developed countries have national curricula and specific teacher-training standards, but the United States does not. Instead decisions on curricular and standards are created and enforced at the state and local levels, often by politically elected figures including governors, mayors, superintendents, and school boards.

      This leaves early education in the United States open to a much greater sway of political influence. This can be seen in examples of Texas attempting to legislate the display the ten commandments in school classrooms in 2023, reading science being neglected in the adoption of Culkins' Units of Study curriculum, and other footballs like the supposed suppression of critical race theory in right leaning states.

    3. Her curriculum, “Units of Study,” is built on a vision of children as natural readers, and it has been wildly popular and profitable. She estimates that a quarter of the country’s 67,000 elementary schools use it. At Columbia University’s Teachers College, she and her team have trained hundreds of thousands of educators.

      Calkins' Units of Study curriculum has been estimated to be used by nearly 25% of the 67,000 elementary schools in the United States in 2023.

    4. For decades, Lucy Calkins has determined how millions of children learn to read. An education professor, she has been a pre-eminent leader of “balanced literacy,” a loosely defined teaching philosophy.

      Columbia University Teachers College education professor Lucy Calkins, a leader of the "balanced literacy" teaching philosophy in reading, has been influential in how millions of children have been learning to read for decades.

    1. Character Development of The Nation's Next Generation In Terms of Reading Habits In The Midst of Sophistication of Technology 5.0

      However the my main 3 points are:

      1. It would be highly valuable if you could undertake a comprehensive comparison of the global scenarios regarding the implementation of initiatives and the corresponding public response across different regions. However, it is not necessary to incorporate this analysis within the confines of the current manuscript. Instead, creating a succinct table comprising multiple references from diverse countries would suffice at this juncture. Subsequently, you would have the opportunity to develop a separate, comprehensive manuscript that delves into a detailed comparison of the aforementioned aspects.

      2. It is important to distinguish between the interests related to engaging with valuable materials through reading and the tools utilized for the act of reading itself. Furthermore, it is worth noting that there are individuals who continue to possess a deep passion for reading and derive great joy from extracting meaning from their literary experiences, while not placing significant emphasis on the tools employed for this purpose.

      3. In my perspective, individuals who engage in reading today enjoy the privilege of selecting their preferred content, determining the timing, location, and sequence of their reading experience. With the abundance of semantic information available on the web, they are not bound by specific reading directions. Moreover, they have the freedom to discern between valuable and less useful readings. Considering the advancements in technology, it would be highly beneficial if people of all ages could prioritize consuming more useful and meaningful material over less beneficial ones.

    1. Roth asks ‘how might our own reading of early modern sources change if we had access to the oral spheres within which they were embedded and which framed their reception?’

      The level of orality in societies can radically change our perceptions of their histories, though quite often this material is missing in our evaluations.

  13. May 2023
    1. Introduction
      • Character growth is important for the younger generation. Reading can help children develop their imagination and creativity.
      • Reading is a habit that can be learned and should be encouraged from an early age.
      • Indonesia has a low reading culture compared to other countries. Reading can help children learn about different cultures and perspectives.
      • There are many definitions of reading, but it is essentially a process of understanding the meaning of written language. Reading can help children improve their vocabulary and grammar skills. Reading can help children develop their critical thinking skills.
      • The impact of sophisticated technology 5.0 on reading habits is still being studied, but it is clear that technology can have a negative impact on reading if it is not used in moderation. Reading can help children relax and de-stress.
    2. Research Methods
      • The method used in compiling this journal is descriptive quantitative.
      • The journal was created by collecting, categorizing and presenting the latest data based on literature searches.
      • The author analyzes the data and draws conclusions.
      • The author wants to make sure how important it is to accustom the nation's next generation to love reading in the midst of Sophisticated Technology 5.0.
      • The author believes that reading is an important activity that can benefit children in many ways.
    3. Results and Discussion
      • Character growth is the process of a character changing and developing over the course of a story.
      • The sophistication of technology 5.0 has had a negative impact on reading habits, as people are more likely to use their devices to watch videos or play games instead of reading.
      • There are a number of solutions to this problem, such as introducing old traditional games to the next generation, holding competitions to read the most books, and creating reading rooms filled with good quality books.
      • Character education is important in today's young generation, as they are more likely to be exposed to negative content on the internet and social media.
      • The younger generation must respond to technological advancement in a positive way, by filtering the things that they obtain from technology.
    4. The younger generation is the main pillar of a nation, which will determine how this country will be in the future. Will it be more advanced or just the opposite? The first fact, UNESCO said that Indonesia ranks second from the bottom in terms of world literacy, meaning that interest in reading is very low. According to UNESCO data, the reading interest of the Indonesian people is very concerning, only 0.001%. This means, out of 1,000 Indonesians, only 1 person is an avid reader!In a different research titled World's Most Literate Nations Ranked conducted by Central Connecticut State University in March 2016, Indonesia was ranked 60th out of 61 countries in terms of reading interest, just below Thailand (59) and above Botswana (61). In fact, in terms of infrastructure assessment to support reading, Indonesia's ranking is above European countries.The second fact is that 60 million Indonesians own gadgets, or the world's fifth largest number of gadget owners. Digital marketing research institute Emarketer estimates that by 2018 the number of active smartphone users in Indonesia will be more than 100 million people. With such a large number, Indonesia will become the country with the fourth largest active smartphone user in the world after China, India and America.Ironically, even though interest in reading books is low, wearesocial data as of January 2017 reveals that Indonesians can stare at gadget screens for approximately 9 hours a day.
      • Indonesia ranks second from the bottom in terms of world literacy.
      • Only 0.001% of Indonesians are avid readers.
      • Indonesia was ranked 60th out of 61 countries in terms of reading interest.
      • 60 million Indonesians own gadgets, or the world's fifth largest number of gadget owners.
      • Indonesians can stare at gadget screens for approximately 9 hours a day.
    1. The Web does not yet meet its design goal as being a pool of knowledge that is as easy to update as to read. That level of immediacy of knowledge sharing waits for easy-to-use hypertext editors to be generally available on most platforms. Most information has in fact passed through publishers or system managers of one sort or another.

  14. Feb 2023
    1. media literacy, ability to verify information from different sources, and other skills

      I wish information literacy had been named here! In libraries, many of us are wondering if this may prompt a shift at institutions where library-led instruction is primarily focused on searching for various documents to a greater emphasis on critical evaluation skills.

    2. Educator considerations for ChatGPT<br /> https://platform.openai.com/docs/chatgpt-education

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Hypothesis</span> in Liquid Margins 38: The rise of ChatGPT and how to work with and around it : Hypothesis (<time class='dt-published'>02/09/2023 16:11:54</time>)</cite></small>

    1. He tried to show that this‘favorite topic’ of his, ‘insistence on exactness in chronological dates’, amounted tomore than a trifling (Deutsch, 1915, 1905a). Deutsch compared such historical accuracyto that of a bookkeeper who might recall his ledger by memory. ‘People would look uponsuch an achievement’, he reflected, ‘as a freak, harmless, but of no particular value, infact rather a waste of mental energy’ (Deutsch, 1916). However, he sought to show thatthese details mattered, no different from how ‘a difference in a ledger of one centremains just as grievous as if it were a matter of $100,000’ (Deutsch, 1904a: 3).

      Interesting statement about how much memory matters, though it's missing some gravitas somehow.

      Is there more in the original source?

    1. Proust writes, with only the faintest irony, “Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature.”

      source? Swann's Way?

      Definitely from a literacy forward perspective!

    1. Some dance to rememberSome dance to forget

      —Eagles, Hotel California, track 1 on the album Hotel California<br /> https://genius.com/Eagles-hotel-california-lyrics

      In many oral societies, dance is a common tool for memory in much the same way that we might pick up a pen and write. Though written in and performed in one of the most literate societies in human history, one might replace "dance" in Hotel California with other forms like writing: "Some write to remember; Some write to forget".

      The first half might be interpreted by the majority as a tautology, but others write in their diaries as a means to purge their memories and let go of them. Similarly the idea of "morning pages" are designed to allow one to purge their surface thoughts so that they can clear their mind for other work: writing to forget.


      (Without hearing this song this morning, I kept (diffuse) thinking about the two line endings "...to remember / ...to forget" until I made the connection to the lyrics and then immediately bridged this to orality.)

  15. Jan 2023
    1. https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15630

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwkRfN-7UWI


      Seven Principles of Data Feminism

      • Examine power
      • Challenge power
      • Rethink binaries and hierarchies
      • Elevate emotion an embodiment
      • Embrace pluralism
      • Consider context
      • Make labor visible

      Abolitionist movement

      There are some interesting analogies to be drawn between the abolitionist movement in the 1800s and modern day movements like abolition of police and racial justice, etc.


      Topic modeling - What would topic modeling look like for corpuses of commonplace books? Over time?


      wrt article: Soni, Sandeep, Lauren F. Klein, and Jacob Eisenstein. “Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 6, no. 1 (January 18, 2021). https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.18841. - Brings to mind the difference in power and invisible labor between literate societies and oral societies. It's easier to erase oral cultures with the overwhelm available to literate cultures because the former are harder to see.

      How to find unbiased datasets to study these?


      aspirational abolitionism driven by African Americans in the 1800s over and above (basic) abolitionism

    1. Research inlanguage development has traditionally emphasizedthelinguistic attainmentsof young children, and it continuesto do so

      Research of language development can also be seen in the development of linguistic attachments for those who are learning new languages as well.

    2. lexicon

      this looks complex

    1. every subject area teacher is responsible for further developing, strengthening and enhancing literacy.

      But why are we as teachers not doing this? We should be able to get together and better their futures.

    2. . Language is explained as a socially and culturally constructed system of communication.

      In what ways were you socialized into literate practices?

    3. traditionally been thought of as reading and writing

      traditionally accepted definiton

    1. When engaging in data literacy work in our classrooms, it’s helpful to keep two ideas at play at once: on the one hand, these algorithmic systems are nowhere near as “smart” as these platforms want to lead us to believe they are; and on the other hand, concerns about accuracy can distract us from the bigger picture, that these platforms are built on a logic of prediction that, one nudge at a time, may ultimately infringe upon users’ ability to make up their own mind.
    1. A visual system such as this allowed observations to be accumulated with less unreliability than orally, and hence provided a degree of estimation of annual variability of these phenomena, and presumably to be embedded into wider artistic and behavioural and mythic contexts.

      A terrifically bold assertion, obviously made by a group overwhelmed by literacy.

      Those with better grounding in oral methods would know better.

    2. The requirement, in ordinal representations of number, that the ‘special’ symbol at the ordinal position of the value being represented must be distinct from all other symbols in a sequence clearly invites a meaning to be associated with the special symbol. With such, there was no longer the need for a purely oral explanation of the system, as all of its components were self-contained to the point of being readable many thousands of years later.
  16. Dec 2022
    1. Three weeks ago, an experimental chat bot called ChatGPT made its case to be the industry’s next big disrupter. It can serve up information in clear, simple sentences, rather than just a list of internet links. It can explain concepts in ways people can easily understand. It can even generate ideas from scratch, including business strategies, Christmas gift suggestions, blog topics and vacation plans.

      ChatGPT's synthesis of information versus Google Search's list of links

      The key difference here, though, is that with a list of links, one can follow the links and evaluate the sources. With a ChatGPT response, there are no citations to the sources—just an amalgamation of statements that may or may not be true.

    1. With medicine, the story was slightly different because of theconstant and urgent need for it. Medical knowledge was alwaysuseful, always relevant, so books on medicine were constantly indemand, and would have been available in the majority of libraries inlate antiquity.

      Transmission of medical knowledge has a more immediate and direct application for people; as a result it may tend to be transmitted more faithfully either in written or oral forms. The written record of medical scrolls from antiquity were in constant demand.

    1. Here’s an example of what homework might look like under this new paradigm. Imagine that a school acquires an AI software suite that students are expected to use for their answers about Hobbes or anything else; every answer that is generated is recorded so that teachers can instantly ascertain that students didn’t use a different system. Moreover, instead of futilely demanding that students write essays themselves, teachers insist on AI. Here’s the thing, though: the system will frequently give the wrong answers (and not just on accident — wrong answers will be often pushed out on purpose); the real skill in the homework assignment will be in verifying the answers the system churns out — learning how to be a verifier and an editor, instead of a regurgitator. What is compelling about this new skillset is that it isn’t simply a capability that will be increasingly important in an AI-dominated world: it’s a skillset that is incredibly valuable today. After all, it is not as if the Internet is, as long as the content is generated by humans and not AI, “right”; indeed, one analogy for ChatGPT’s output is that sort of poster we are all familiar with who asserts things authoritatively regardless of whether or not they are true. Verifying and editing is an essential skillset right now for every individual.

      What homework could look like in a ChatGPT world

      Critical editing becomes a more important skill than summation. When the summation synthesis comes for free, students distinguish themselves by understanding what is correct and correcting what is not. Sounds a little bit like "information literacy".

  17. Nov 2022
    1. Mark: The Japanese hypertext scholar Kumiyo Nakakoji talks about amplified representational talkback, which is a general design phenomenon. An architect, an artist, or a writer puts something on paper and then looks at it. You look at it, and then it seems different from what you had in mind, and you either correct what you’ve written, or you see that what you’ve written is right and correct your bad idea. That kind of representational talkback is fundamental to all sorts of all creative processes, from the sciences to the arts.
    1. We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class. — Griswold, McDonnell and Wright, “Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century,” Annual Review of Sociology (2005) They see two options for readers in society: Gaining “power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital” Becoming culturally irrelevant and backwards with “an increasingly arcane hobby”

      Reading is suggested to be potentially waning, maybe becoming more elite or even obsolete. It seems to disregard its counterpart: writing. For every thing that can be read, writing has preceded it. Writing, other than direct transcription, is not just creating text it is a practice, that also creates effects/affordances for the writer. Also thinking of Rheingold's definition of literacy as a skill plus community in which that skill is widely present. Writing/reading started out as bookkeeping, and I assume professional classes will remain text focused (although AR is an 'oral' path here too)

  18. learn-ap-southeast-2-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com learn-ap-southeast-2-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com
    1. range of digital literacy practices

      This is a significant aspect of social annotation/Hypothesis. The low barrier for entry and the low-stakes nature of the work make it a great way to develop digilit, potentially, as people can engage with connecting and linking in their writing.

    1. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tendsto express itself in words, spoken or written. The person whosays he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually doesnot know what he thinks.

      Active reading is thinking, and thinking requires expression which can come in many forms including both spoken and written ones.


      I like that he acknowledges that expression (and thus thinking) can be done in both oral or written forms.

    2. Weare on record as holding that unlimited educational opportunity-or, speaking practically, educational opportunity thatis limited only by individual desire, ability, and need-is themost valuable service that society can provide for its members.

      This broadly applies to both oral and literate societies.

      Desire, ability, and need are all tough measures however... each one losing a portion of the population along the way.

      How can we maintain high proportions across all these variables?

    1. The Zettelkasten Method is based on this experience: One cannot think without writing - at least not in demanding contexts that anticipate selective access to memory. This also means: without notching differences one cannot think.

      Sönke Ahrens roughly quoted this passage or one like it (check the reference), but I criticized it for not being inclusive of indigenous people or oral methods. Luhmann, however, went further and was at least passively more inclusive by saying that one needs to be able to "notch differences" to be able to think, and this is a much better framing.

  19. Oct 2022
    1. By teaching them all to read, we have left them atthe mercy of the printed word.

      Knowing how to read without the associated apparatus of the trivium, leaves people open to believing just about anything. You can read words, but knowing what to do with those words, endow them with meaning, and reason with them. (summarization)


      Oral cultures with knowledge systems engrained into them would likely have included trivium-esque structures to allow their users to not only better remember to to better think and argue.

    1. I can't believe I read a tweet saying retrieval practice must be written. What about ...<br><br>- MFL?<br>- EYFS/KS1?<br>- Practical subjects?<br>- Cold calling?<br>- Students with SEND?<br>- EAL learners?<br>- Oracy?<br>- Think, pair & share?<br>- Flashcards?<br><br>Writing is so important, as is verbal recall.

      — Kate Jones (@KateJones_teach) September 26, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. This effort, which Americans have supported almostfrom the beginning of the national existence and which is oneof the cornerstones of our democratic way of life, has hadremarkable results.

      Read in juxtaposition with the knowledge of orality and along with Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, one could certainly argue that there are other ways of knowing which provide potentially better pathways to democracy.

      Further, the simple fact of basic literacy doesn't necessarily encourage democracy. Take a look at the January 6th (2021) insurrectionists who were likely broadly literate, but who acted more like a damaged oral society and actively subverted democracy.

      Literacy plus "other things" are certainly necessary for democracy. How do we define these other things, and then once we have, is literacy still part of the equation for democracy?

    2. The first is the continuing effort of the United States to educate all of its citizens,which means, of course, at a minimum, to make them allliterate.

      Depending on how it is done and the culture in which it is done, forcing literacy on a people, even when well-intentioned can be a devastating and colonialist act.

    1. There was no awareness that any kind of coherent history of the periods before the development of writing was possible at all. In the words of the Danish scholar Rasmus Nyerup (1759–1829): Everything which has come down to us from heathen-dom is wrapped in a thick fog; it belongs to a space of time which we cannot measure. We know that it is older than Christendom, but whether by a couple of years or a couple of centuries, or even by more than a millennium, we can do no more than guess.

      This is particularly interesting in light of the research of Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell who within about 50 years dramatically changed the viewpoint of history.


      Orality has something to say about this now too...

    1. Edgerly noted that disinformation spreads through two ways: The use of technology and human nature.Click-based advertising, news aggregation, the process of viral spreading and the ease of creating and altering websites are factors considered under technology.“Facebook and Google prioritize giving people what they ‘want’ to see; advertising revenue (are) based on clicks, not quality,” Edgerly said.She noted that people have the tendency to share news and website links without even reading its content, only its headline. According to her, this perpetuates a phenomenon of viral spreading or easy sharing.There is also the case of human nature involved, where people are “most likely to believe” information that supports their identities and viewpoints, Edgerly cited.“Vivid, emotional information grabs attention (and) leads to more responses (such as) likes, comments, shares. Negative information grabs more attention than (the) positive and is better remembered,” she said.Edgerly added that people tend to believe in information that they see on a regular basis and those shared by their immediate families and friends.

      Spreading misinformation and disinformation is really easy in this day and age because of how accessible information is and how much of it there is on the web. This is explained precisely by Edgerly. Noted in this part of the article, there is a business for the spread of disinformation, particularly in our country. There are people who pay what we call online trolls, to spread disinformation and capitalize on how “chronically online” Filipinos are, among many other factors (i.e., most Filipinos’ information illiteracy due to poverty and lack of educational attainment, how easy it is to interact with content we see online, regardless of its authenticity, etc.). Disinformation also leads to misinformation through word-of-mouth. As stated by Edgerly in this article, “people tend to believe in information… shared by their immediate families and friends”; because of people’s human nature to trust the information shared by their loved ones, if one is not information literate, they will not question their newly received information. Lastly, it most certainly does not help that social media algorithms nowadays rely on what users interact with; the more that a user interacts with a certain information, the more that social media platforms will feed them that information. It does not help because not all social media websites have fact checkers and users can freely spread disinformation if they chose to.

    1. The only reason we are better at thinking and doing thingsnow—the only reason that Aristotle, Michelangelo, and Einstein blazed into theintellectual firmament in the last couple of thousand years and not 30,000 yearsago—is that we accumulate knowledge and pass ideas and information from onegeneration to the next.

      Is he falling trap to the lure of literacy as the only means of crystallizing knowledge here? He starts with a literate Aristotle and specifically mentions 30,000 years ago instead of oral cultures which we know could do this sort of work orally almost 65,000 years ago.

    1. And yet that is not " r e a l l y " how the project arose.What really happened is that the idea and the plan cameout o f my files; for all projects with me begin and end withthem, and books are simply organized releases from thecontinuous work that goes into them.

      Surely by "files" he means his written notes and ideas which he has filed away?

      Thus articles and books are agglomerations of ideas within notes (or perhaps one's retained memory, as best as that might be done) which are then broken off from them and released to a wider readership.

  20. Sep 2022
    1. In combination with SCA, CERICoffers freedom from the transmission model of learning, where theprofessor lectures and the students regurgitate. SCA can help buildlearning communities that increase students’ agency and power inconstructing knowledge, realizing something closer to a constructivistlearning ideal. Thus, SCA generates a unique opportunity to makeclassrooms more equitable by subverting the historicallymarginalizing higher education practices centered on the professor.

      Here's some justification for the prior statement on equity, but it comes after instead of before. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/SHEFJjM6Ee2Gru-y0d_1lg)

      While there is some foundation to the claim given, it would need more support. The sage on the stage may be becoming outmoded with other potential models, but removing it altogether does remove some pieces which may help to support neurodiverse learners who work better via oral transmission rather than using literate modes (eg. dyslexia).

      Who is to say that it's "just" sage on the stage lecturing and regurgitation? Why couldn't these same analytical practices be aimed at lectures, interviews, or other oral modes of presentation which will occur during thesis research? (Think anthropology and sociology research which may have much more significant oral aspects.)

      Certainly some of these methods can create new levels of agency on the part of the learner/researcher. Has anyone designed experiments to measure this sort of agency growth?

    1. I think that’s the biggest thing that I take from this: any text should at least hint at the rich tapestry of things it is resulting from, if not directly discuss it or link to it. A tapestry not just made from other texts, but other actions taken (things created, data collected, tools made or adapted), and people (whose thoughts you build on, whose behaviour you observe and adopt, who you interact with outside of the given text). Whether it’s been GPT-3 generated or not, that holds.

      Useful and likely human written texts show the richness of the context it results from, by showing and linking. Not just to/with 1) other texts, but also 2) other actions (things created, data gathering, experiments, tools adapted) and 3) people (that provided input, you look at, interact with outside the text). Even if such things were generated following up those leads should show its inauthenticity.

    2. No proof of work (to borrow a term) other than that the words have been written is conveyed by the text. No world behind the text, of which the text is a resulting expression. No examples that suggest or proof the author tried things out, looked things up. Compare that to the actual posting

      A text is a result of work, next to itself being work to write it. A text that does not show any of the work that led to writing a text is suspect. Does a text reflect an exploration that it annotates? Does it show social connections, include data points, external examples, artefacts created alongside the text (e.g. lists), references to the wider context/system of what the text discusses, experimental actions.

    3. No links! No links, other than sporadic internal links, is the default in the media, I know. Yet hyperlinks are the strands the Web is made of. It allows pointing to side paths of relevance, to the history and context of which the posting itself is a result, the conversation it is intended to be part of and situated in. Its absence, the pretense that the artefact is a stand alone and self contained thing, is a tell. It’s also a weakness in other online texts, or any text, as books and journals can be filled with links in the shape of footnotes, references and mentions in the text itself)

      Relevant links in a text are a sign of the context the text emerged from, and the conversation it is situated in. Lack of such links or references is a potential sign of inauthentic texts (generated or not)

    1. structured literacy, a type of early reading instruction that calls for the “explicit,” “systematic,” “cumulative” and “diagnostic” teaching of key elements:phonology, which encompasses the ability to distinguish and manipulate soundssound-symbol association (letter–sound relationships) syllables morphology (think: root words and affixes) syntax semantics
    1. California Could Mandate Kindergarten— What’s This Mean For School Districts And Childcare Providers?A bill that would create a mandatory kindergarten program in California has passed the legislature and is now heading to governor Gavin Newsom’s office for a final decision. The legislation, Senate Bill 70, would require children to complete one year of kindergarten before they’re admitted to the first grade. This comes as districts in California struggle with enrollment, having been a major issue during the pandemic. But if this legislation were to be signed by Governor Newsom, how would it affect teachers, the child care industry, and the children themselves.Today on AirTalk, we discuss the bill and it support among public schools with Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) superintendent Alberto Carvalho and Justine Flores, licensed childcare provider in Los Angeles and a negotiation representative for Child Care Providers United.

      Timestamps 19:11 - 35:20

      CA Senate Bill 488 2021; signed, in process,

      Orton-Gillingham method (procedure/process) but can be implemented differently. Rigorous and works. Over 100 years old.

      Wilson program uses pieces of OG. What's this? Not enough detail here.

      Dyslexia training will be built into some parts of credentialling programs.

      Each child is different.

      This requires context knowledge on the part of the teacher and then a large tool bag of methods to help the widest variety of those differences.

      In the box programs don't work because children are not one size fits all.

      Magic wand ? What would you want?

      Madhuri would like to have: - rigorous teaching in early grades - if we can teach structured literacy following a specific scope in sequence most simple to most complex - teaching with same familiar patterns over and over - cumulative (builds on itself) - multisensory - explicit - Strong transitional kindergarten through grade 3 instruction

      Prevention trumps intervention.

      Otherwise you're feeding into the school to prison pipeline.

      Madhuri's call for teaching that is structured, cumulative, multisensory, and explicit sounds a lot like what I would imagine orality-based instruction looks like as well. The structure there particularly makes it easier to add pieces later on in a way that literacy doesn't necessarily.

  21. Aug 2022
    1. NAAL defines literacy as both task-based and skills-based.

      I wonder if there are also soft skills in literacy

    2. NAAL defines literacy as both task-based and skills-based

      I wonder if there are also soft skills in literacy/

    1. Margo Neale (featured at right) suggests that the Songlines project can be conceived as a Third Archive, a bridge between the First Archive of Indigenous knowledges, kept alive in the songlines that crisscross Australia, and the Second Archive, that of the Western Knowledge system, imported into Australia through colonisation and settlement and transmitted through our education systems and institutions of government, business and civil society.
    1. And the good news about it is that you can actually train your attention, and it’s not that difficult. In fact, almost every contemplative meditation discipline has to do with just sitting down and paying attention to your breath and noticing how your attention changes. There is a saying that comes from the neuroscientists that neurons that fire together are wired together. When you begin paying attention to your attention, you are developing a capability that enables you to have more control over what’s occupying your mind space.

      attention as mindfulness, and as a muscle to train.

    2. You know, it’s not really that difficult, but it’s not being taught at all.

      Reminds me of my 2008/2010 projects in primary schools on this. I find myself explaining marketing ploys to our 6yo in response to material she sees in print, on billboards, and online. Perhaps I should be doing that more consistently

    3. training on how to understand how you’re deploying your attention.

      There's little training on reflecting and shaping how you wield your attention. Are there resources to be found, wrt workflows / choices / being mindfull of one's attention? Beyond the 'indistractable' material of Nir?

      The exclusionary aspect of attention makes it a scarce resource [[Aandacht is het schaarst 20201013163120]] implying the need to wield it with intent [[Stuur aandacht met intentie 20220213080032]] or it becomes distraction again. It's a moral choice [[Aandacht is een morele keuze 20201217074345]] even. Making such training/understanding important.

    4. And when we now live in an era where you can stand on a street corner in any city of the world, waiting for the light to change, and notice that everyone else — everyone else — standing around you is looking at their phone. There’s a lot of money in capturing people’s attention, and there are a lot of apps that are designed to capture and maintain our attention

      This is, like some of his Stanford in-class attention experiments, a bit geared towards switching on/offline it seems. There's much to be said also about wielding attention within the digital space (see Pegrum/Palalas digital disarray above), and attention as it plays out in the interweaving of the digital and physical (like having information resources available within a conversation).

    5. But attention is really the foundation of thought and communication.

      Aandacht als fundament onder zowel denken als communiceren.

      Pegrum/Palalas 2021 talk about attention literacy as needed to counteract 'digital disarray'. They also call it a macro-literacy, encompassing a long list of 'digital literacies' which are more skills than literacy in the Rheingoldia sense. Bit of term inflation? Does put attention at the top of the heap of digital 'literacies' though. They also do incorporate relationships to others and the informational environment within scope of it a la Rheingold.

    6. basic literacies that users of the web and social media ought to have

      Rheingold perceives literacy as skill within community. A skill that comes into its own if there's a community of skilled people, a social practice. He may have adopted it from Paulo Freire who put reading/writing skills interwoven with reading/writing the world (mentioned in Kalir/Garcia's Annotation too). Do I see that community aspect, the social practice aspects in the 5 literacies he lists from Net Smart?

      1. Attention [[Aandacht als geletterdheid 20201117203910]]
      2. Participation
      3. Collaboration
      4. Network awareness
      5. Crap detection, or 'Critical consumption' in polite company (I have it as : [[Crap detection is civic duty 2018010073052]]
    1. Paleography is the study of the history of handwriting. It involves 3 skillsets: attribution (establishing date/place of origin by comparison); literacy (learning to read unfamiliar scripts); and description (distinguishing between scribes).
    1. My task...is, by the power of the written word, to makeyou hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to makeyou see. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

      Direct source?

      This could be interesting with respect to what it says to me about seeing things within one's mind's eye with respect to orality.

    2. ! Doing the work of linkingideas together, whether in a digital or analog system,seems to be the only sure key to creating connections thatwill allow you to return in the future and follow the sametrail of ideas.

      A nod to Vannevar Bush's phrase "associative trails" or a throwback to the much older cultural ideas of memory and orality in the vein of songlines?

      link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/bMy1FBM8Ee2K_nOEDpfB_A

    1. Patients with limited health literacy are more likely to misunderstand medication instructions and have difficulty demonstrating the correct dosing regimen. Limited health literacy is associated with increased healthcare costs and worse health outcomes, including increased mortality.

      Introduction for Health Literacy

    1. Kahne and Bowyer (2017) exposed thousands of young people in California tosome true messages and some false ones, similar to the memes they may see on social media
    2. Many U.S.educators believe that increasing political polarization combine with the hazards ofmisinformation and disinformation in ways that underscore the need for learners to acquire theknowledge and skills required to navigate a changing media landscape (Hamilton et al. 2020a)
  22. Jul 2022
    1. The effortinvolved in writing a note in their own words, whichinstructional designers like to call a “desirable difficulty”helps shift the idea from short-term to long-termmemory (this is the same reason many note-makers areshifting back to hand-writing on cards rather thandepending on automated apps)

      The work of writing things down or transforming them into pictures, diagrams, song, art, other creates a context shift in the material which requires greater engagement within the brain and may help to improve understanding.


      Compare/contrast the ideas of context shifting with desirable difficulty.


      Note that this use of "context shifting" (within the pedagogy space) is dramatically different to that used by people like Cal Newport and others (within the productivity space).

    2. Thetechniques and tools we’re going to discuss in this sectionon note-making are focused mostly on texts, but they canbe applied to ideas that come to you from discussion,listening to lectures, experiment, or life experience.

      This might also include other forms of art including song and dance.

      Link this to: - choreography notation (@remikalir's sister in ballet) - Caleb Deschanel's cinematography notation which he likened to musical notation

    3. AuthorW.H. Auden demystified both literature and criticismwhen he said, “Here is a verbal contraption. How doesit work?”

      Auden himself kept a commomplace book of his own notes which was published as A Certain World: A Commonplace Book #, so we can read some of his notes! :)

    4. While it maybe possible to talk without thinking, it is probably moredifficult to write without thinking.

      Has talking without thinking become worse with the advent of literacy and writing?

    5. writing is thinking

      Talking, like writing, is also a form of thinking, but without a lot of work it doesn't have the instantaneous "memory" built into the process.

      "Let's talk this out..."

      Link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/5Ct1LJqTEeyewcuZMx620Q<br /> - https://hypothes.is/a/xvqbambjEey2CKNBjNDhFg

    1. For example, in the Phaedrus, one of Plato’s dialogues from the 4th century BCE, Socrates relates the myth of the king Thamus and the god Theuth. Theuth was the inventor of letters — the first technology of thinking!

      Another of the abounding examples of people thinking that writing and literacy are the first technology of thinking.

    1. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1547390915689566211.html via https://twitter.com/nicolas_gatien/status/1547390946156969984

      Nicolas, I broadly agree with you that many of these factors of reading and writing for understanding and retention are at play and the research in memory and spaced repetition underlines a lot of this. However in practice, one needs to be revisiting and actively using their notes for some particular project to remember them better. The card search may help to create both visual and physical paths that assist in memory too.

      Reliance solely on a physical zettelkasten however may not be enough without active use over time, particularly for the majority of users. It's unlikely that all or even many may undertake this long term practice. Saying that this is either the "best", "optimum", or "only" way would be disingenuous to the diversity of learners and thinkers.

      Those who want to add additional strength to these effects might also use mnemonic methods from indigenous cultures that rely on primary orality. These could include color, images, doodles (drolleries anyone?), or other associative methods, many of which could be easily built into an (antinet) zettelkasten. Lynne Kelly's work in this area can be highly illuminating. For pure practical application and diversity of potential methods, I recommend her book Memory Craft https://amzn.to/3zdqqGp, but she's got much more academic and in depth work that is highly illustrative.

      With this background on orality and memory in mind we might all broadly view wood and stone circles (Stonehenge), menhir, standing stones, songlines, and other mnemonic devices in the archaeological and sociological records as zettelkasten which one keeps entirely in their memory rather than writing them down. We might also consider, based on this and the historical record concerning Druids and their association with trees that the trees served a zettelkasten-like function for those ancient societies. This continues to extend to lots of other cultural and societal practices throughout history. Knowledge from Duane Hamacher et al's book The First Astronomers and Karlie Noone and Krystal De Napoli's Astronomy: Sky Country will underline these theories and practices in modern indigenous settings.

    1. So we end up with the problem usually referred to as ‘information overload’ but I prefer to call notification literacy. As I say in the linked post, there are preventative measures and mitigating actions you can take as an individual to help ‘increase your notification literacy’. There are also ways of facilitating communities that can help, for example if the platform you’re using has threaded comments, insisting that people use instead of a confusing, undifferentiated stream of messages. You can also ensure you have a separate chat or channel just for important announcements.
    1. Unfortunately, many corporate software programsaim to level or standardise the differences betweenindividual workers. In supporting knowledgeworkers, we should be careful to provide tools whichenable diversification of individuals’ outputs.Word-processors satisfi this criterion; tools whichembed a model of a knowledge worker’s task in thesoftware do not.

      Tools which allow for flexibility and creativity are better for knowledge workers than those which attempt to crystalize their tasks into ruts. This may tend to force the outputs in a programmatic way and thereby dramatically decrease the potential for innovative outputs. If the tools force the automation of thought without a concurrent increase in creativity then one may as well rely on manual labor for their thinking.


      This may be one of the major flaws of tools for thought in the educational technology space. They often attempt to facilitate the delivery of education in an automated way which dramatically decreases the creativity of the students and the value of the overall outputs. While attempting to automate education may suit the needs of institutions which are delivering the education, particularly with respect to the overall cost of delivery, the automation itself is dramatically at odds with the desire to expand upon ideas and continue innovation for all participants involved. Students also require diverse modes of input (seen/heard) as well as internal processing followed by subsequent outputs (written/drawn/sculpted/painted, spoken/sung, movement/dance). Many teachers don't excel at providing all of these neurodiverse modes and most educational technology tools are even less flexible, thus requiring an even larger panoply of them (often not interoperable because of corporate siloing for competitive reasons) to provide reasonable replacements. Given their ultimate costs, providing a variety of these tools may only serve to increase the overall costs of delivering education or risk diminishing the overall quality. Educators and institutions not watching out for these traps will tend to serve only a small portion of their intended audiences, and even those may be served poorly as they only receive a limited variety of modalities of inputs and outputs. As an example Western cultures' overreliance on primary literacy modes is their Achilles' heel.


      Tools for thought should actively attempt to increase the potential solution spaces available to their users, while later still allowing for focusing of attention. How can we better allow for the divergence of ideas and later convergence? Better, how might we allow for regular and repeated cycles of divergence and convergence? Advanced zettelkasten note taking techniques (which also allow for drawing, visual, auditory and other modalities beyond just basic literacy) seem to allow for this sort of practice over long periods of time, particularly when coupled with outputs which are then published for public consumption and divergence/convergence cycles by others.

      This may also point out some of the stagnation allowed by social media whose primary modes is neither convergence nor divergence. While they allow for the transmission/communication portion, they primarily don't actively encourage their users to closely evaluate the transmitted ideas, internalize them, or ultimately expand upon them. Their primary mode is for maximizing on time of attention (including base emotions including excitement and fear) and the lowest levels of interaction and engagement (likes, retweets, short gut reaction commentary).

    1. Reading encourages us to put outside reality on hold, to construct a parallel world in our minds, and retreat into it.
    2. literacy theorists and neuroscientists attest, reading and writing have a profound effect on the way we think
  23. Local file Local file
    1. 'I don't think it's anything—I mean, I don't think it was ever put to anyuse. That's what I like about it. It's a little chunk of history that they'veforgotten to alter. It's a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew howto read it.'

      Walter and Julia are examining a glass paperweight in George Orwell's 1984 without having context of what it is or for what it was used.

      This is the same sort of context collapse caused by distance in time and memory that archaeologists face when examining found objects.

      How does one pull out the meaning from such distant objects in an exegetical way? How can we more reliably rebuild or recreate lost contexts?

      Link to: - Stonehenge is a mnemonic device - mnemonic devices in archaeological contexts (Neolithic carved stone balls


      Some forms of orality-based methods and practices can be viewed as a method of "reading" physical objects.


      Ideograms are an evolution on the spectrum from orality to literacy.


      It seems odd to be pulling these sorts of insight out my prior experiences and reading while reading something so wholly "other". But isn't this just what "myths" in oral cultures actually accomplish? We link particular ideas to pieces of story, song, art, and dance so that they may be remembered. In this case Orwell's glass paperweight has now become a sort of "talking rock" for me. Certainly it isn't done in any sort of sense that Orwell would have expected, presumed, or even intended.

  24. Jun 2022
    1. "The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized," says Abigail Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge in England and co-author of The Myth of the Paperless Office. "Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don't think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book."

      How might we design better digital reading interfaces that take advantage of a wider range of modes of thinking and reading?

      Certainly adding audio to the text helps to bring in benefits of orality, but what other axes are there besides the obvious spatial benefits?

    2. Instead of hiking the trail yourself, the trees, rocks and moss move past you in flashes with no trace of what came before and no way to see what lies ahead.

      Just as there are deficits like dyslexia in the literate world, are there those who have similar deficits relating to location in the oral world? What do these look like? What are they called specifically?

      There are definitely memory deficits withing cognitive neuropsychology. Is there a comprehensive list one could look at?

      Some people aren't as good at spatial orientation as others. Women are stereotyped as being less good at direction and direction finding.

    3. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared.

      How does location affect our reading? Is it similar to methods of location and memory within oral traditions?

    1. Es gilt daher, diese digitale Affinität der Studie-renden methodisch und inhaltlich zu motivieren und philosophisch fruchtbar zumachen

      Das sagt Will Richardson auch für den Bereich der Schule so. Es muss, in der Schule noch mehr, v.a. pädagogische und didaktische Expertise in digitale Transformationen einfließen. Man läuft sonst Gefahr u.a. Konsumtendenzen nicht kritisch gegenüber treten zu können und unmündiges Verhalten an den Tag zu legen und im schlimmsten Falle zu lehren.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. That is why building a Second Brain is a journey of personalgrowth. As your information environment changes, the way yourmind operates starts to be transformed.

      This also happens with the techniques of orality, but from an entirely different perspective. Again, these methods are totally invisible even to an expert on productivity and personal knowledge management.

      Not even a mention here of the ancient Greeks bemoaning the invention of literacy as papering over valuable memory.

    1. For Jerome Bruner, the place to begin is clear: “One starts somewhere—where the learner is.”

      One starts education with where the student is. But mustn't we also inventory what tools and attitudes the student brings? What tools beyond basic literacy do they have? (Usually we presume literacy, but rarely go beyond this and the lack of literacy is too often viewed as failure, particularly as students get older.) Do they have motion, orality, song, visualization, memory? How can we focus on also utilizing these tools and modalities for learning.

      Link to the idea that Donald Trump, a person who managed to function as a business owner and president of the United States, was less than literate, yet still managed to function in modern life as an example. In fact, perhaps his focus on oral modes of communication, and the blurrable lines in oral communicative meaning (see [[technobabble]]) was a major strength in his communication style as a means of rising to power?

      Just as the populace has lost non-literacy based learning and teaching techniques so that we now consider the illiterate dumb, stupid, or lesser than, Western culture has done this en masse for entire populations and cultures.

      Even well-meaning educators in the edtech space that are trying to now center care and well-being are completely missing this piece of the picture. There are much older and specifically non-literate teaching methods that we have lost in our educational toolbelts that would seem wholly odd and out of place in a modern college classroom. How can we center these "missing tools" as educational technology in a modern age? How might we frame Indigenous pedagogical methods as part of the emerging third archive?

      Link to: - educational article by Tyson Yunkaporta about medical school songlines - Scott Young article "You should pay for Tutors"


      aside on serendipity

      As I was writing this note I had a toaster pop up notification in my email client with the arrival of an email by Scott Young with the title "You should pay for Tutors" which prompted me to add a link to this note. It reminds me of a related idea that Indigenous cultures likely used information and knowledge transfer as a means of payment (Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power). I have commented previously on the serendipity of things like auto correct or sparks of ideas while reading as a means of interlinking knowledge, but I don't recall experiencing this sort of serendipity leading to combinatorial creativity as a means of linking ideas,

    2. She had the kind of exacting patience required for video editing.

      Beyond this, Gracie also had senses of timing and spatial skills that many also often lack. This is a sort of neurodiversity piece which some are either lifted up or pulled down by within our literacy-focused teaching system.

      It may be a skill she's focused on improving, or one which she's naturally gifted and might improve upon to use in a professional career. Focusing on a literacy-only framing for her education is the sort of thing that, instead of amplifying her talents, may have the effect of completely destroying them, and her altogether.

    3. From the classroom, to the street, to the Internet, Eric’s voice carried, and carried within it the possibility of a kind of education–amplified with digital technologies– that enables other human beings to become conscious, to become responsible, to learn.

      Sadly, we seem to have othered orality and cultural practices which don't fit into the Western literate cultural box. This prevents us from moving forward as a society and a diverse culture.

      In the 90's rap was culturally appropriated by some because of its perception as "cool" within the culture. Can this coolness be leveraged as a reintroduction of oral methods in our culture without the baggage of the appropriation? Can it be added to enhance the evolving third archive? As a legitimate teaching tool?

    4. listen deeply to Eric’s story

      Beyond Eric's words here, I'm struck by the fact that he's able to do this "feat" orally in a way that I certainly cannot. Perhaps he spent ages slowly building it up and writing it down in a literal fashion, but I suspect that part of it is not and that it is raw oral poetry in a way which requires culture and oral practice that I wholly lack, but wish I had.

      How can we better teach this?! Center this.

      Link to: - Eminem's stacking ammo

    1. It will be interesting to see where Eyler takes his scholarship post-COVID. I’ll be curious to learn how Eyler thinks of the intersection of learning science and teaching practices in an environment where face-to-face teaching is no longer the default.

      Face-to-face teaching and learning has been the majority default for nearly all of human existence. Obviously it was the case in oral cultures, and the tide has shifted a bit with the onset of literacy. However, with the advent of the Internet and the pressures of COVID-19, lots of learning has broken this mold.

      How can the affordances of literacy-only modalities be leveraged for online learning that doesn't include significant fact-to-face interaction? How might the zettelkasten method of understanding, sense-making, note taking, and idea generation be leveraged in this process?

    1. “So I’m supposed to ask the Lakota Language Consortium if I can use my own Lakota language,” Taken Alive asked in one of many TikTok posts that would come to define his social media presence. 

      Based on some beyond the average knowledge of Indigenous cultures, I'm reading some additional context into this statement that is unlikely to be seen or understood by those with Western-only cultural backgrounds who view things from an ownership and capitalistic perspective.

      There's a stronger sense of identity and ownership of language and knowledge within oral traditions than can be understood by Westerners who didn't grow up with it.

      He obviously feels like we're stealing from him all over again. We need better rules and shared definitions between Indigenous peoples and non before embarking on these sorts of projects.

    2. But the copyright on the materials still gives the organization control over how the information is used, which is what some tribal leaders find objectionable.

      Oral cultures treat information dramatically different than literate cultures, and particularly Western literate cultures within capitalism-based economies.

    1. the man's eight videos posted to TikTok last Thursday and Friday generated much attention. Combined, the posts garnered more than 2 million views and were recirculated on YouTube and Instagram by large-scale content creators reaching exponentially more people

      When parody is consumed as news, and the fake news spreads.

  25. May 2022
    1. a constellation already described in 1805 by Heinrich von Kleist in his fascinat-ing analysis of the “Midwifery of Thought”: “If you want to know something and cannotfind it through meditation, I advise you, my dear, clever friend, to speak about it withthe next acquaintance who bumps into you.” 43 The positive tension that such a conversa-tion immediately elicits through the expectations of the Other obliges one to producenew thought in the conversation. The idea develops during speech. There, the sheeravailability of such a counterpart, who must do nothing further (i.e., offer additionalstimulus through keen contradiction of the speaker) is already enough; “There is a specialsource of excitement, for him who speaks, in the human face across from him; and agaze which already announces a half-expressed thought to be understood often givesexpression to the entire other half.”44
      1. Heinrich von Kleist, “Ü ber die allm ä hliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Zweiter Band, ed. Helmut Sembdner (M ü nchen: dtv, 1805/2001), 319 – 324, at 319.
      2. Ibid., 320.

      in 1805 Heinrich von Kleist noted that one can use conversation with another person, even when that person is silent, to come up with solutions or ideas they may not have done on their own.

      This phenomena is borne out in modern practices like the so-called "rubber duck debugging", where a programmer can talk to any imagined listener, often framed as a rubber duck sitting on their desk, and talk through the problem in their code. Invariably, talking through all the steps of the problem will often result in the person realizing what the problem is and allow them to fix it.

      This method of verbal "conversation" obviously was a tool which indigenous oral cultures frequently used despite the fact that they didn't have literacy as a tool to fall back on.

    1. knowledgebegins with the simple, time-honored practice of taking notes

      Definite bias for literacy here.

    2. You may find this book in the “self-improvement” category, but in adeeper sense it is the opposite of self-improvement. It is aboutoptimizing a system outside yourself, a system not subject to you

      imitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

      Some may categorize handbooks on note taking within the productivity space as "self-help" or "self-improvement", but still view it as something that happens outside of ones' self. Doesn't improving one's environment as a means of improving things for oneself count as self-improvement?

      Marie Kondo's minimalism techniques are all external to the body, but are wholly geared towards creating internal happiness.

      Because your external circumstances are important to your internal mental state, external environment and decoration can be considered self-improvement.


      Could note taking be considered exbodied cognition? Vannevar Bush framed the Memex as a means of showing associative trails. (Let's be honest, As We May Think used the word trail far too much.)

      How does this relate to orality vs. literacy?

      Orality requires the immediate mental work for storage while literacy removes some of the work by making the effort external and potentially giving it additional longevity.

    1. I grew up on PHP, it was the first thing beyond BASIC I ever wrote

      Should we lean into that? Maybe some sort of "server BASIC" is what we need.

      NB: need not (read: "should not") actually be a BASIC; moreso a shared spirit (see also: Hypercard)

    1. Umgekehrt versucht man aktuelle Konzeptionen, die ihren sprachlichen Ursprungim angelsächsischen Raum haben, wie das der „Literacy“ mit Bildung zu über-setzen, was aber nach Koch (2004, S. 189) nicht adäquat ist: „Von einem Bil-dungskonzept wird beim literacy-Programm wohl kaum die Rede sein können,sondern lediglich von einem allgemeinen Qualifikationskonzept, es sei denn, dassman von Bildung bloß in nachlässiger Form redet und geläufige Sprachgewohn-heiten bedient.“ Die gegen das Literacy-Konzept geführten Argumente kritisierendieses als auf Ausbildung reduziertes Bildungskonzept, welches den Menschen alsHumankapital betrachtet und nicht im emphatischen Sinne als Person, vgl. dazuauch Lessing & Steenblock (2010, S. 9). So wird gemäß der OECD (2000, S. 5)„Reading Literacy“ als ein Konzept bestimmt, mit dem instrumentelle Kenntnisseund Fähigkeiten von Schülerinnen und Schülern beschrieben werden. Innerhalbder angestellten Diskussion (Unterabschnitt 3.3.1) des humboldtschen Bildungs-begriff ist aber gezeigt worden, dass instrumentelle Kenntnisse nicht hinreichendfür Bildung sind.

      digital literacy auch?

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. Updating the script

      This is less than ideal. Besides non-technical people needing to wade into the middle of (what very well might appear to them to be a blob of) JS to update their site, here are some things that Zonelets depends on JS for:

      1. The entire contents of the post archives page
      2. The footer
      3. The page title

      This has real consequences for e.g. the archivability for a Zonelets site.

      The JS-editing problem itself could be partially ameliorated by with something like the polyglot trick used on flems.io and/or the way triple scripts do runtime feature detection using shunting. When the script is sourced via script element from another page, it behaves as JS, but when visited directly as the browser destination it is treated like HTML and has its own DOM tree for the script itself to make the necessary modifications easier. Instead of requiring the user to edit it as freeform text, provide a structured editing interface, so e.g. adding a new post is as simple as clicking the synthesized "+" button in the list of posts, copying the URL of the post in question, and then pasting it in—to a form field. The Zonelets script itself should take care of munging it into the appropriate format upon form "submission". It can also, right there, take care of the escaping issue described in the FAQ—allow the user to preview the generated post title and fix it up if need be.

      Additionally, the archives page need not by dynamically generated by the client—or rather, it can be dynamically filled in exactly once per update—on the author's machine, and then be reified into static HTML, with the user being instructed to save it and overwrite the served version. This gets too unwieldy for next/prev links in the footer, but (a) those are non-essential, and don't even get displayed for no-JS users right now, anyway; and (b) can be seen to violate the entire "UNPROFESSIONAL" etthos.

      Alternatively, the entire editing experience can be complimented with bookmarklets.

    1. The skills they are learning provide a model for the spectrum of skills thatall mindful digital participants presently can deploy for their own benefitand the public good.

      hier werden die interest driven geek communities quasi als Vorreiter partizipativer literacies ausgewiesen - kann man das auch von hackern sagen? und vereint die Vorreiter v.a. ein Verständnis von Digitalität, das - wenngleich intuitiv - die Netzwerkdynamiken mehr als weniger eigenständig und selbstbestimmt und -bestimmend einschließt? und kommt hier simondon rein? Wer die Technik kennt, kann sie mitgestalten - kann sich mit ihr gestalten - Ideen für das Simondon Seminar - Technik Transparenz, Prozessverständnis (rudimentär, bzw. spezifisch für den jeweiligen Bereich) - das Gegenteil sind eigentlich proprietäre Angebote, die Verdunkeln - teils bewusst, siehe Böhmi Facebook Folge - was sie können und was sie lassen. Simondon - Hacker Ethik - Technischer Mensch - Digitaler Mensch - schon mal ein paar rohe Ideen von mir - außerdem muss ich in die Didaktischen Texte von ihm schauen

    2. Digital participation literacy employs a toolbox of skills (persuasion,curation, discussion, and self-presentation foremost among them), andspans a range of involvement, from tagging a photo or bookmarking a site,to editing a Wikipedia page or publishing a blog.

      participation literacy

  26. Apr 2022
    1. The historian in me always wants to look back at how this sort of media control has played out historically, so thinking about examples like William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, David Sarnoff, Axel Springer, Kerry Packer, or Rupert Murdoch across newspapers, radio, television, etc. might be interesting. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_proprietor

      Tim Wu's The Master Switch is pretty accessible in this area.


      On the intercultural front, the language (very careful public relations and "corporate speak") used in this leaked audio file of the most recent Twitter All Hands phone call might be fascinating and an interesting primary source for some of the questions you might be looking at on such an assignment. https://peertube.dk/w/2q8cdKR1mTCW7RyMQhcBEx

      Who are the multiple audiences (acknowledged and unacknowledged) being addressed? (esp. as they address leaks of information in the call.)

    1. Given the difficulty of regulating every online post, especially in a country that protects most forms of speech, it seems far more prudent to focus most of our efforts on building an educated and resilient public that can spot and then ignore disinformation campaigns

      On the need for disinformation educations

      ...but what is the difference "between what’s a purposeful attempt to mislead the public and what’s being called disinformation because of a genuine difference of opinion"

    1. the brain stores social information differently thanit stores information that is non-social. Social memories are encoded in a distinctregion of the brain. What’s more, we remember social information moreaccurately, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “social encodingadvantage.” If findings like this feel unexpected, that’s because our culturelargely excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect. Socialexchanges with others might be enjoyable or entertaining, this attitude holds, butthey’re no more than a diversion, what we do around the edges of school orwork. Serious thinking, real thinking, is done on one’s own, sequestered fromothers.

      "Social encoding advantage" is what psychologists refer to as the phenomenon of people remembering social information more accurately than other types.

      Reference to read: “social encoding advantage”: Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013), 284.

      It's likely that the social acts of learning and information exchange in oral societies had an additional stickiness over and beyond the additional mnemonic methods they would have used as a base.

      The Western cultural tradition doesn't value the social coding advantage because it "excludes social interaction from the realm of the intellect" (Paul, 2021). Instead it provides advantage and status to the individual thinking on their own. We greatly prefer the idea of the "lone genius" toiling on their own, when this is hardly ever the case. Our availability bias often leads us to believe it is the case because we can pull out so many famous examples, though in almost all cases these geniuses were riding on the shoulders of giants.

      Reference to read: remember social information more accurately: Jason P. Mitchell, C. Neil Macrae, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Encoding-Specific Effects of Social Cognition on the Neural Correlates of Subsequent Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 24 (May 2004): 4912–17

      Reference to read: the brain stores social information: Jason P. Mitchell et al., “Thinking About Others: The Neural Substrates of Social Cognition,” in Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About Thinking People, ed. Karen T. Litfin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 63–82.

    1. Literacy is expanding

      Why the choice of this metaphor? Is literacy an accordion file? Is it that the definition of literacy is expanding? Who has the right to say what literacy means or how it expands? Or is this position statement a backward looking report on the change that has already taken place? I have been using cheap and adaptable media tools for years but I am still writing "essays" and "poems" and research presentations with them just like I did in the analog 20th century days.

    1. In the information age, filtering systems, driven by algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), have become increasingly prominent, to such an extent that most of the information you encounter on the internet is now rearranged, ranked and filtered in some way. The trend towards a more customised information landscape is a result of multiple factors. But advances in technology and the fact that the body of information available online grows exponentially are important contributors.

      And, in fact, the filtering systems are driven by signals of the searcher, not signals of the content. Past behavior (and user profiling), current location (IP address recognition), device type (signal of user intent and/or social-economic status), and other user-specific attributes are being used to attempt to offer users the information that the provider thinks the user is looking for.

    1. »Mal-mir-was«-Debatte

      Auf der methodisch-praktischen Ebene spricht sich Tiedemann für eine abwechslungsreiche Gestaltung des Philosophie- und Ethikunterrichts aus. Allerdings steht er einer Gleichberechtigung präsentativer und diskursiver Formen kritisch gegenüber und besteht darauf, die Essenz philosophischer Bildung als kategoriengeleitete, argumentative Rechtfertigung zu verstehen. (Wikipedia ) präsentative oder diskursive Medien im Philounterricht? Auch eine Frage bezüglich der Weite des literacy Begriffs

    1. Printing made books affordable to greater numbers than before, as various humanist observers noted, whether they felt this was for the better (Andrea de Bussi, Ludovico Carbone) or for the worse (e.g., Hieronymo Squarcia- fico).17

      Example that every new technology will have its proponents and its detractors.

      link to Plato/Socrates on the use of writing as a replacement for speaking and memory.

    1. I believe we serve our students better by helping them find a note-taking system that works best for them.

      Are there other methods of encouraging context shifts that don't include note taking (or literacy-based) solutions? What would an orality focused method look like? How might we include those methods in our practices?

    1. “Man Who Killed Amanda Knox’s Roommate Freed on Community Service.” My name is the only name that shouldn’t be in that headline.

      I find it interesting that Amanda's name is the only name mentioned in the New York Post's headline. Not the killer's, nor the victim's, Meredith Kercher. Even though this same New York Post, published an article on March 27, 2015 of Amanda's acquittal. The headline should read, "Rudy Guede, the man who murdered Meredith Kercher, Freed on Community Service." In my opinion the New York Post continues to use her name because it's probably more recognizable, than the others, and they need to sell papers. It's marketing! Doesn't make it right though. But geesh! Give Meredith some respect!

  27. Mar 2022
    1. ‘connected educator’

      An interesting term ... what makes a digitally literate educator a connected one?

    2. PLNs (professional learning networks) and their role in supporting the development of  ‘connected educators’.

      Professional learning networks support professional development of educators (who are digitally literate). Is this a more modern connected version or an extension of communities of practice?

    1. Topic A topic was once a spot not a subjecttopic. to ̆p’ı ̆k. n. 1. The subject of a speech, essay, thesis, or discourse. 2. A subject of discussion or con-versation. 3. A subdivision of a theme, thesis, or outline.*With no teleprompter, index cards, or even sheets of paper at their disposal, ancient Greek and Roman orators often had to rely on their memories for holding a great deal of information. Given the limi-tations of memory, the points they chose to make had to be clustered in some meaningful way. A popular and quite reliable method for remembering information was known as loci (see Chapter 9), where loci was Latin for “place.” It involved picking a house you knew well, imagining it in your mind’s eye, and then associating the facts you wanted to recall with specifi c places inside of that house. Using this method, a skillful orator could mentally fi ll up numerous houses with the ideas he needed to recall and then simply “visit” them whenever he spoke about a particular subject. The clusters of informa-tion that speakers used routinely came to be known as commonplaces, loci communes in Latin and koinos topos in Greek. The great Greek philosopher Aristotle referred to them simply as topos, meaning “places.” And that’s how we came to use topic to refer to subject or grouping of information.**

      Even in the western tradition, the earliest methods of mnemonics tied ideas to locations, from whence we get the ideas of loci communes (in Latin) and thence commonplaces and commonplace books. The idea of loci communes was koinos topos in Greek from whence we have derived the word 'topic'.

      Was this a carryover from other local oral traditions or a new innovation? Given the prevalence of very similar Indigenous methods around the world, it was assuredly not an innovation. Perhaps it was a rediscovery after the loss of some of these traditions locally in societies that were less reliant on orality and moving towards more reliance on literacy for their memories.

  28. citeseerx.ist.psu.edu citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
    1. The complete overlapping of readers’ and authors’ roles are important evolution steps towards a fully writable web, as is the ability of deriving personal versions of other authors’ pages.
    2. Writing for the web is still a complex and technically sophisticated activity. Too many tools, languages, protocols, expectations and requirements have to be considered together for the creation of web pages and sites.
    1. Taking search as a learning instrument to the next level of engagement, dashboards can be used educationally as well as journalistically. I know a sixth-grade teacher who had her students create dashboards instead of writing papers.

      Dashboards bauen in der Schule

    2. Levy asked them to keep a log of their email behavior for a week

      Protokoll des Emailverhaltens - analog könnte man sagen des social media Verhaltens, des online Verhaltens (hier sollte aber eine Konkretisierung dazukommen) smartphone Verhaltens (mithilfe von Screentimeanalyseapps) - bei dem Protokoll/Tagebuch ist es wichtige auch emotionales Befinden UND Atmung zu notieren, um festzuhalten wie diese durch den Mediengebrauch beeinflusst werden

    3. nstead of “Am I dreaming?” try “Have I drifted?”

      Treibe ich weg? Parallele zu Klarträumen - Träume ich?

    4. Having helped train her dyslexic son to read, plus having studied dys-lexia scientifically, Wolf appears to be a strong believer in the power of teaching and learning. She contends that the demonstrable power of teach-ing alphabetic literacy can be applied to the challenge of information and media literacies:We must teach our children to be “bitextual” or “multitextual,” able to read and ana-lyze texts flexibly in different ways, with more deliberate instruction at every stage of development on the inferential, demanding aspects of any text. . . . My major conclusion from an examination of the developing reader is a cautionary one. I fear that many of our children are in danger of becoming just what Socrates warned us against—a society of decoders of information, whose false sense of knowing distracts them from a deeper development of their intellectual potential. It does not need to be so, if we teach them well, a charge that is equally applicable to our children with dyslexia.71Developing a pedagogy of attention is, I believe, the basis for Wolf’s kind of education.

      Entwicklung einer Pädagogik der Aufmerksamkeit als Basis für eine Erziehung, die analog zur Erziehung von dyslexischen Kindern zum Lesen, alle Kinder die Orientierung in der von den Kindern dekodierten Informationsflut lehrt.

    5. The analytical, inferential, perspective-taking reading brain with all its capacity for human consciousness, and the nimble, multifunctional, multimodal, information-integrative capacities of a digital mind-set do not need to inhabit exclusive realms

      Annahme: digitales mind-set und Lektürekompetenz schließen einander nicht aus

    1. skill means I know how to read 00:10:56 and write but social means I'm also able to participate in the community of literate and and this goes for all sorts of literacies not just alphabetic literacy

      Hier kommt mir das Gespann von Ich-Selbst, Ich-Welt und Ich-Du Beziehung in Humboldts Bildungsbegriff in den Sinn - ich glaube, dass mindestens ein eingeschränkter Anschluss an dieser Stelle besteht - wiederum nicht, um die Bildung auf digital literacies zu begrenzen oder umgekehrt 'alles, was heute wichtig ist, auf bereits Gedachtes reduktiv zurückzuführen', sondern, um vorhandene, ältere Ressourcen mit neueren transformativ zusammenzudenken - was bleibt, was kommt hinzu? Lässt sich eine inhärente Logik der Bildung skizzieren, die auch in digital literacies zu finden ist? Und kann ggf. der Bildungsbegriff Rheingolds literacy Ansatz (sinnvoll) erweitern helfen? Digitale philosophische Bildung = philosophische Bildung, insofern letztere die erste miteinschließt - weil beide begriffliche Erfassung der Realität darstellen - und da das Internet nicht bloße Simulation ist, ist dies einzuschließen

    2. think we need to go beyond skills to literacies and by that I mean my definition is skills plus community and 00:01:46 we're talking about social media here so I want to touch upon not not all of the literacies that are facing us but I think five of the the most important

      Rheingold: Literacy is skill + community - Welche Rolle spielt nun die Gemeinschaft/community für den Bildungsbegriff? Hier muss wieder eine Klärung geschehen

    3. but I believe that the skill this literacy if you will

      Was denn jetzt? Unterschied Skill and Literacy muss ich noch dringend klären

    1. Peter Eseli of Mabuiag Island (known locally as Mabuyag)in the western Torres Strait began writing down traditional knowledgein the Kala Lagau Ya language in the early twentieth century. By1939, Eseli had amassed a 77-page manuscript, complete withdrawings, songs and genealogies as well as a wealth of starknowledge, some of which is included in this book. He continuedadding to it until his death in 1958. His manuscript was latertranslated into English.
    2. In 1898, Māori man Te Kōkau and his son, Rāwairi Te Kōkau,began recording traditional star knowledge in the Māori language.After 35 years, they had amassed a 400-page manuscript that

      contained over a thousand star names. Rāwairi passed the manuscript to his grandson, Timi Rāwairi. In 1995, Timi’s own grandson asked him about Matariki, a celebration that kicks off the Māori new year, heralded by the dawn rising of the Pleiades star cluster. Timi went to a cupboard, pulled out the manuscript and handed it to his grandson, Rangi Mātāmua.

      Was it partially coincidence that this knowledge was written down and passed on within the family or because of the primacy of the knowledge within the culture that helped to save in spanning from orality into literacy?

      What other examples might exist along these lines to provide evidence for the passing of knowledge at the border of orality and literacy?

      Link this to ideas about the border of orality and literacy in Welsh and Irish.

    3. Indigenous scholars conducting scientific research combine formalacademic training and a personal lived experience that bridgesIndigenous and Western ways of knowing. In the United States andCanada, this concept is called Etuaptmumk, meaning ‘Two-EyedSeeing’. Etuaptmumk comes from the Mi’kmaw language of easternCanada and Maine, and was developed by Elders Dr Albert Marshalland Murdina Marshall.

      Developed by Elders Dr. Albert Marshall and Murdina Marshall, the Mi'kmaw word Etuaptmunk describes the concept of "Two-Eyed Seeing". It is based on the lived experience of Indigenous peoples who have the ability to see the world from both the Western and Indigenous perspectives with one eye on the strengths of each practice.


      The idea behind Etuaptmunk is designed and geared toward Western thinkers who place additional value on the eyes and literacy. Perhaps a second analogy of "Two-Eared Hearing" might better center the orality techniques for the smaller number of people with lived experiences coming from the other direction?

      These ideas seem somewhat similar to that of the third culture kid.

    4. ‘Yes, ofcourse we have science! We’ve been saying that for years, but noone will listen.’

      No one has listened to Indigenous peoples when they say that they have science. The major boundary in hearing in this case is that Indigenous peoples rely on orality where as Western people rely more heavily on literacy. This barrier has obviously been a major gap between these cultures.

    5. Science is something anyone can do, and everyone has done. Theprocess on paper is simple: closely observe the world, test what you learn,and transmit it to future generations. Just because Indigenous cultureshave done this without test tubes doesn’t make them unscientific—justdifferent.

      Perhaps there's a clever dig here that she uses the phrase "on paper" here because most indigenous cultures have done these things orally!

      quote from Dr. Annette S. Lee

    1. The Inca left behind a three-dimensional system, a 3D “script.”

      Silvia Ferrara analogizes the quipu to a three-dimensional "script".

  29. Feb 2022
    1. Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the advantages of writing. In oralpresentations, we easily get away with unfounded claims. We candistract from argumentative gaps with confident gestures or drop acasual “you know what I mean” irrespective of whether we knowwhat we meant. In writing, these manoeuvres are a little too obvious.It is easy to check a statement like: “But that is what I said!” Themost important advantage of writing is that it helps us to confrontourselves when we do not understand something as well as wewould like to believe.

      In modern literate contexts, it is easier to establish doubletalk in oral contexts than it is in written contexts as the written is more easily reviewed for clarity and concreteness. Verbal ticks like "you know what I mean", "it's easy to see/show", and other versions of similar hand-waving arguments that indicate gaps in thinking and arguments are far easier to identify in writing than they are in speech where social pressure may cause the audience to agree without actually following the thread of the argument. Writing certainly allows for timeshiting, but it explicitly also expands time frames for grasping and understanding a full argument in a way not commonly seen in oral settings.

      Note that this may not be the case in primarily oral cultures which may take specific steps to mitigate these patterns.

      Link this to the anthropology example from Scott M. Lacy of the (Malian?) tribe that made group decisions by repeating a statement from the lowest to the highest and back again to ensure understanding and agreement.


      This difference in communication between oral and literate is one which leaders can take advantage of in leading their followers astray. An example is Donald Trump who actively eschewed written communication or even reading in general in favor of oral and highly emotional speech. This generally freed him from the need to make coherent and useful arguments.

    1. Because of the constantly growing number of volumes, and to minimize coordination issues, Gottfried van Swieten emphasizes a set of instructions for registering all the books of the court library. Written instructions are by no means common prior to the end of the eighteenth century. Until then, cataloging takes place under the supervision of a librarian who instructs scriptors orally, pointing out problems and corrections as every-one goes along.

      Unlike prior (oral) efforts, Gottfried van Swieten created a writtten set of instructions for cataloging texts at the Austrian National Library. This helped to minimize coordination issues as well as time to teach and perfect the system.


      Written rules, laws, and algorithms help to create self-organization. This is done by saving time and energy that would have gone into the work of directed building of a system instead. The saved work can then be directed towards something else potentially more productive or regenerative.

    1. The problem almost certainly starts with the conception of what we're doing as "building websites".

      When we do so, we mindset of working on systems

      If your systems work compromises the artifacts then it's not good work

      This is part of a broader phenomenon, which is that when computers are involved with absolutely anything people seem to lose their minds good sensibilities just go out the window

      low expectations from everyone everyone is so used to excusing bad work

      sui generis medium

      violates the principle of least power

      what we should be doing when grappling with the online publishing problem—which is what this is; that's all it is—is, instead of thinking in terms of working on systems, thinking about this stuff in such a way that we never lose sight of the basics; the thing that we aspire to do when we want to put together a website is to deal in

      documents and their issuing authority

      That is, a piece of content and its name (the name is a qualified name that we recognize as valid only when the publisher has the relevant authority for that name, determined by its prefix; URLs)

      that's it that's all a Web site is

      anything else is auxiliary

      really not a lot different from what goes on when you publish a book take a manuscript through final revisions for publication and then get an ISBN issued for it

      so the problem comes from the industry

      people "building websites" like politicians doing bad work and then their constituents not holding them accountable because that's not how politics works you don't get held accountable for doing bad work

      so the thing to do is to recognize that if we're thinking about "websites" from any other position things that technical people try to steer us in the direction of like selecting a particular system and then propping it up and how to interact with a given system to convince it to do the thing we want it to do— then we're doing it wrong

      we're creating content and then giving it a name

  30. Jan 2022
  31. Dec 2021
    1. Pratt persuaded tribal elders and chiefs that the reason the "Washichu" (Lakota word for white man, loosely translates to Takes the Fat) had been able to take their land was that the Indians were uneducated. He said that the Natives were disadvantaged by being unable to speak and write English and, if they had that knowledge, they might have been able to protect themselves.

      Example where literacy provides perceived power over orality.

    1. political self-consciousness sort of 00:55:29 receding as one goes further back in time there was a book published in 1946 by the Dutch archaeologist Henry Frank Ford's called befall philosophy which 00:55:42 was about the the ancient Middle East Mesopotamia and Egypt and all that sort of thing but he wasn't actually arguing that these people didn't have the capacity for philosophy he was simply 00:55:55 pointing out that they didn't have an explicit written tradition of speculative thought like that of the ancient Greeks so that when they did speculate they did it in other ways 00:56:07 through images through discourse on the nonhuman world etc etc to find the idea that there have actually ever been individuals who didn't possess any capacity for philosophical reflection

      Henri Frankfort in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (1946) (later retitled Before Philosophy) argued that non-literate people had philosophy and speculative thought, they just didn't have a written method of expressing it.

      Open questions: How might they have expressed it other than orally? How might one tease these ideas out of the archaeological record? Does Frankfort provide evidence?

    1. The “agricultural revolution,” so the mainstream argument goes, was a double-edged sword – it triggered the big leap in human civilisation which brought us writing, culture, history all things that make humans “special;” but it also led to hierarchy, organised power, bureaucracy, and inequality. Graeber and Wengrow had been suspicious about this narrative for a long time – they did not believe in this evolutionary, progressive, and deterministic parable.

      Focusing on literacy as one of the features that makes humanity special is a major flaw. In fact, it is likely our earlier orality and the attendant portions that come with that which made us unique within the animal kingdom. While transmission of knowledge and information may be quicker with literacy and even with computer technology, our ability to cope with it stems first from our orality.

    1. In oral societies, personal memories fade and even-tually disappear, and yet knowledge somehow remains, as does language. Con-sequently, social memory arises outside, but not independently of, individual psychic systems; it may be regarded as the recursive outcome of communica-tions that are operatively reproduced inside social systems.14

      This idea of transmission of knowledge within oral societies is worth exploring. What is the media of transmission? How does it work in comparison with literate societies? What is the overlap in the two Venn Diagrams?

  32. Nov 2021
    1. While the advent of printing is commonly thought to have resulted in the demise of the manuscript, Bouza upholds that the progress of textual culture in all its forms did not undermine the importance of other mediums of knowledge.

      What sorts of forms does this take?

      It's obviously true from a cultural perspective, but it's much more difficult to do this from a historical perspective for things which happened 2000 years ago, for example.

    2. Seeking to address the reductive opposition both between written and oral texts and between script and print in the Early Modern period, Fernando Bouza, one of Spain's most influential cultural historians, makes an elegant case for the equality and complementary natures of the various modes of communication.

      This may prove an interesting perspective given my own desire to explore some of the same sorts of dynamics in Celtic texts at the border of orality and literacy in the early centuries of the common era.

  33. Oct 2021
  34. Sep 2021
    1. Near the end (@1:50:32):

      My website is glench.com, and that's kind of my repository of everything I've ever made

    2. Around 1:48:00

      What if every library that you use had, like, some interactive documentation or interactive representation? [...] The author could maybe add annotations.

    1. playing house

      This is how I feel about most people's personal websites. Few people have homepages these days, but even for people who do, even fewer of those homes have anyone really living there. All their interesting stuff is going on on Twitter, GitHub, comments on message boards...

      Really weird when this manifests as a bunch of people having really strong opinions about static site tech stacks and justifications for frontend tech that in practice they never use, because the content from any one of their profiles on the mainstream social networks outstrips their "home" page 100x to 1.

    1. what counts as authoritative varies by audience and is layered with historical understanding of truth and trust

      Authority is constructed and contextual.

  35. Aug 2021
    1. I looked at workflows that were similar to GitHub Pages. I realized that what I was craving was very simple: Write text. Put on internet. Repeat.
    1. The reason we keep using email is that for that set of tasks requiring more than plaintext but less than an app we have nothing. MS Word maybe.
    2. chances are it’s a worthless piece of junk to you compared to the email method
    3. When Nicole shops, she writes it out on a sheet of paper
    1. What’s up with African American literacy rates? David L. Horne, PH.D. | 10/3/2013, midnight

      In the world of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other quick strike information processes, why is there a definite lack of evidence of a steady upward progression of reading and writing skills among African American contributors?

      Post secondary education statistics continue to demonstrate that far too many African American students who finish high school do so as functional illiterates—that is, they cannot read and write at a basic level requisite for functional participation in modern life. In California, both the California State University system and the University of California system still annually allow (and mainly require) a significant proportion of incoming freshmen to register for developmental English courses—sometimes called “dumbbell” English— in order to assist the students in preparing to take regular-level freshmen college basic education courses. These developmental courses generally do not count toward a student’s graduation but must still be paid for through regular tuition. Both university systems realize this is not a very efficient use of taxpayer dollars, however, the literacy levels of the students coming to them out of high school require this kind of intervention. As of 2009, the Department of Education reported that literacy rates for more than 50 percent of African American children in the fourth grade nationwide was below the basic skills level and far below average; and by the ninth grade nationwide, the situation had gotten worse, with the rate dropping below 44 percent. Yes, there is still an unemployment crisis in the nation’s Black communities, but what is feeding and ensuring the longevity of that crisis is the ballooning illiteracy rate among Black youth and adults. What happened to that post-antebellum slavery zeal that put educational attainment, including reading and writing skills, as the sustained priority for advancement in American society? How did we drop that ball? These are bedeviling questions especially with Sept. 24 labeled National Punctuation Day, and it was accompanied by a broad national reflection on the lack of proper writing skills among modern American youth. Officially, NPD, “is a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis.” Giving even a casual glance at regular comments typed into Twitter, Instagram and on Facebook pages, American youth are in deep need, accompanied by deepening denial, of literacy help. And, citing the old chestnut, “when White folks sneeze, Black folks catch the flu,” where there is this dire a problem among America’s youth in general, African American youth are staring at death’s door regarding functional literacy in America. What can be done about it, if anything? Where there is still parenting going on, we need to encourage the love of reading (not just urge our youth to read so-called great books), and we need to encourage African American youth to actually write sentences in letters, notes, homework assignments, etc. We might even spend a little time checking—proof-reading—their material ourselves. African Americans simply cannot afford this self-imposed hump onto already overloaded backs. It’s one thing to still have to fight everyday acts of random racism in our lives. That’s the nature of the beast we deal with. It is another thing altogether though, to handicap ourselves. Suicide has never been our favorite or most popular response to oppression, but we have to call this literacy problem what it is—cultural and political suicide. C’mon ya’ll. Let’s get with it. Forward not backwards. Professor David L. Horne is founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute, which is a new 501(c)(3) pending community-based organization or non-governmental organization (NGO). It is the stepparent organization for the California Black Think Tank which still operates and which meets every fourth Friday.

      DISCLAIMER: The beliefs and viewpoints expressed in opinion pieces, letters to the editor, by columnists and/or contributing writers are not necessarily those of OurWeekly.

      Source: http://ourweekly.com/news/2013/oct/03/whats-african-american-literacy-rates/

      This article discusses an issue that has dogged that African American community for centuries.

    1. Funnily enough, I've been on an intellectual bent in the other direction: that we've poisoned our thinking in terms of systems, for the worse. This shows up when trying to communicate about the Web, for example.

      It's surprisingly difficult to get anyone to conceive of the Web as a medium suited for anything except the "live" behavior exhibited by the systems typically encountered today. (Essentially, thin clients in the form of single-page apps that are useless without a host on the other end for servicing data and computation requests.) The belief/expectation that content providers should be given a pass for producing brittle collections of content that should be considered merely transitory in nature just leads to even more abuse of the medium.

      Even actual programs get put into a ruddy state by this sort of thinking. Often, I don't even care about the program itself, so much as I care about the process it's applying, but maintainers make this effectively inextricable from the implementation details of the program itself (what OS version by which vendor does it target, etc.)

  36. Jul 2021
    1. One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packag­ing of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements-all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics-to make it easy for him to "make up his own mind" with the mini­mum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and "plays back" the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed ac­ceptably without having had to think.

      This is an incredibly important fact. It's gone even further with additional advances in advertising and social media not to mention the slow drip mental programming provided by algorithmic feeds which tend to polarize their readers.

      People simply aren't actively reading their content, comparing, contrasting, or even fact checking it.

      I suspect that this book could use an additional overhaul to cover many of these aspects.

    2. whether the advent of modem communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.

      But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modem communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.

      Now that I'm thinking about it, I sort of want the ability to more easily capture audio, annotate and save it while I'm listening to radio or even television. Pausing the media and having the ability to reply it (TIVO and some DVRs provide this capability) and do other things with it would be truly fantastic, especially for saving tidbits for later use and consumption.