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This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it's nothing but wires and lights in a box.

Google revealed Wednesday it had been released from an FBI gag order that came with a secret demand for its customers’ personal information.

Cryptography experts overwhelmingly agree that backdoors inevitably undermine the security of strong encryption, making the two essentially incompatible.

Learning is emergent and not prescriptive.

And now the machines are going to be producing a set of answers and we’ll have to say, Yeah, all I know is this thing does math better than me, so if it says this is true, it’s probably true.

redesign

There’s a mismatch between what the professors are trying to get them to do, which is really understanding, and what the kids are trying to do, which is to know it. You can’t fight history — they are moving to a world of knowing, not understanding.

How do you actually get the ideas into the brains of these kids?

re-engineer themselves

Limitless access to knowledge brings limitless opportunity. But only to those who learn to manage the new currency: their attention.

Programming is not a detail that can be left to ‘technicians’ under the false pretence that their choices will be ‘scientifically neutral’. Societies are too complex

Insisting on the glamour and fun of coding is the wrong way to acquaint kids with computer science. It insults their intelligence and plants the pernicious notion in their heads that you don’t need discipline in order to progress. As anyone with even minimal exposure to making software knows, behind a minute of typing lies an hour of study.

The English Reformation began, one recalls, with an assault on the monasteries

gossip, which some attribute to the need to stay abreast of news among friends and family as our social networks expanded.

Distractions arrive in your brain connected to people you know (or think you know), which is the genius of social, peer-to-peer media.

Power Mac G5

The idea of the computer network as an engine of liberation is an innocent fraud.

Benkler and his cohort had good intentions, but their assumptions were bad. They put too much stock in the early history of the web, when the system’s commercial and social structures were inchoate, its users a skewed sample of the population. They failed to appreciate how the network would funnel the energies of the people into a centrally administered, tightly monitored information system organised to enrich a small group of businesses and their owners.

I often struggle to achieve the level of autonomy that seems necessary for this work because authority over, and ownership of, education has been distributed to a wide variety of stakeholders

We are unapologetic tinkerers who neither invent the wheel, nor are satisfied with the wheels already at our disposal.

that’s where we want to be heading, the place where practical user freedoms and developer capabilities meet.

the route to personal cyberinfrastructure is likely to run through storage-neutral apps.

You get the freedoms you want, but the freedoms you care about are actually a pain in the ass to exercise.

Libraries like jQuery are useful because they hide the ugly details of dealing with cross-browser differences in JS engines. But these OO-helper libraries are different: they're going to great lengths to hide the true nature of JavaScript's OO mechanisms, instead masking them in a set of patterns that are more familiar to other languages.

Procedural programming and OOP are not going to get us where we need to go by themselves.

“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.” ~ John Maeda

How it’s implemented doesn’t matter at all unless it’s implemented poorly.The only thing that matters in software development is that your users love the software.

life is full of enough difficult things that we do not need to make life more difficult on purpose.

We don’t have to turn every choice into an object lesson. Nor do we need to make childhood as joyless as adulthood can be.

code is never without an ethic or an agenda.

Is it possible to imagine spaces, experiences, and opportunities for our students to wed the praxis of coding with the philosophies of the humanities?

trigger warnings are a fundamental part of feminist teaching because they help create a community of learners who acknowledge difference.

professional outgrowths of that old blogging school

“The original sin is a homogenous leadership,” one former senior employee told BuzzFeed News. “This is part of what exacerbated the abuse problem for sure — because they were often tone-deaf to the concern of users in the outside world, meaning women and people of color.”

of course those people are not going to be receptive to the message coming from the people who view them with contempt and scorn. I think that is why Brexit won, and I think that is the real danger of Trump winning.

I see my role as being a corrective to whatever consensus emerges that I don’t think is being subjected to enough critical scrutiny.

What if, as the cybersecurity consultant Matt Tait asked last month in relation to the DNC emails, a source — like, say, a hacker working for a Russian intelligence agency — provided WikiLeaks with a cache of documents that was tampered with in order to smear a political candidate?

They exert agency, in other words, on the formation of the world beyond their head.

many of my generation are increasingly craving a return to this attentional autonomy. There’s something dehumanizing about the endless attention engineered feeds scrolling by on smart phones.

for people to live in a a society that is free and fair, they need both access to information and the ability to communicate freely

the Luddite hammer has to be brought down again on a number of currently dominant assumptions about education.

By suggesting a script for my questions, my phone attempts to program me.

rather than helping us understand the task, this kind of simplification helps us ignore the task and instead understand the device.

at the end of the day, all we’re doing here is soapboxing into a robot.

Any eLearning tool, no matter how openly designed, will eventually become indistinguishable from a Learning Management System once a threshold of supported use-cases has been reached.

A critical pedagogue risks enacting the same paternalism they are criticising.

my students are the most central members of the community in which I learn critical pedagogy.

Nobody is going to tell me how to be a better teacher; I have to discover it for myself. But that doesn’t mean that I’m on my own.

I had presumed that my students would find inquiry-based pedagogy empowering — The textbook is not the authority, you are! — but paradoxically, this “empowerment” was something I tried to push them into by force.

I tried to do too much too quickly, and the whole thing fell apart.

inquiry learning is naturally a more fluid process than what students are accustomed to

If learning happens in communities, why do we require students to keep their eyes on their own paper?

When I first started reading about critical pedagogy I found the scholarship interesting but too abstract. I understood that it was intentionally non-prescriptive, but it also seemed impractical to me.

Would the spaces where novel ideas can emerge unbound by efficiency or productivity be eliminated, the consequence would be no less than the simultaneous destruction of all non-actual possible worlds

What is now useless can open up whole new worlds tomorrow. And even if it never does, it is beautiful, in that it has the markings of the play of possibility that is life and mind.

One-size-fits-all education rarely fits anyone well

break case catch class const continue debugger default delete do else enum export extends false finally for function if implements import in instanceof interface let new null package private protected public return static super switch this throw true try typeof var void while with yield

You should imagine variables as tentacles, rather than boxes. They do not contain values; they grasp them

There is only one value in JavaScript that is not equal to itself, and that is NaN

The string has to stay on a single line.

musical training may improve verbal memory in typically developing children and this may have implications for planning new speech and language interventions for children with Down syndrome.

We must approach the Internet of Things as a space of learning, not as a way to monitor and regulate.

these things make education increasingly about obedience, not learning.

The less we understand our tools, the more we are beholden to them.

do ethical things with data.

There is no island of pure critique.

there is also no digital humanities without complicity,

there is no digital humanities without community

the nature of the stream is it pushes you away from comprehension and into rhetoric. Rather than seeking to understand, the denizen of the modern Twitter or Weibo feed seeks to sort incoming information as right or wrong, helpful or unhelpful, worth retweeting or not retweeting, worth getting into a righteous rage about or not

Digital tools offer the opportunity to refocus how power works in the classroom.

APIs are building blocks of software by definitionCompared with SaaS, by nature, they are platforms that allow development on top of them.It brings back the nature of “building block” that open source has and SaaS lost.API’s businesses focus on solving “smaller” problems but hard to crackFor that reason, there are higher chances that customers will trust an API provider for their core infrastructure.“If this is the only thing those guys do, there’s high chances they will do it better than myself”.

start with the basic premise: respecting your reader’s time. Can they find the story somewhere else, and if yes, then WHY should they read you? What makes what you want to publish so special? Remember, readers have a million choices, to find information. They are better equipped than you. So why should they come to you? What is it that you got that others don’t?

One doesn’t need to be a pundit, one needs to read more, and have the ability to learn from every conversation.

write posts that are more informed, more insightful, and more respectful of the readers.

If we don’t like ‘the system’ of ed-tech, we should create one of our own. It’s actually not beyond our reach to do so.

Our challenge remains – in indie music and in indie scholarship and in indie ed-tech – to make this path one that is economically and emotionally sustainable.

what I do now – write about education technology – has nothing to do with what I studied formally as an undergraduate or a graduate student. But if nothing else, there I learned how to be a critical thinker, a thoughtful researcher, and a decent writer – and I’d contend that no matter what major you pursue in school, these are the sorts of skills all students should, ideally, come away with.

Simply saying competition is divisive won’t raise standards for collaboration, and won’t create the grounds for hope. To do this, we urgently need to start collecting new stories and evidence of a different culture forged in kindness, that we know we can build together. Then maybe we need to start making our own videos.

I told them you could work 60 hours a week, never take a holiday or weekend off, have internationally regarded publications – lots of them, write textbooks, be a great teacher, and managers will still ask for more. And more. I told them you are measured only by what you have not managed to achieve, not what you have achieved, never mind how valuable or prestigious.

 In effect, the status of an academic has slid from institutional asset to indentured servant.

And so the answer to the question “Why is Twitter so culturally complex?” is that it’s the wrong question. It’s Facebook that is the weird thing here, a community that doesn’t develop an overall culture overtime.