Stephen Downes

Building a RSS Viewer With Vue: Part 1

I do like stuff like this. "In this article, I'm going to explain how I put it together and also what's wrong with it. I knew getting into this that I was going to make some compromises, so the plan is to follow up this version with a nicer one in a follow-up post."

Today: 90 Total: 90 Raymond Camden, CSS-Tricks, 2018/06/21 [Direct Link]

The Make to Learn Electric Motor Design Sequence

I like this idea."The goal of the project is for students to gain fluency in the process of invention and to understand related science concepts embodied in the inventions." They do this by having students make not just one but a sequence of progressively more advanced electric motors. "Kits have been developed for three types of motors in the electric motor sequence: (a) the Davenport Rotary motor, (b) the Charles Page Solenoid motor, and (c) a contemporary linear motor based on a 20th-century design." I never got to do anything like this when I was in school. I wish I had. 13 page PDF. From the just released current edition of International Journal of Designs for Learning.

Today: 93 Total: 93 Glen Bull, Joe Garofalo, Michael Littman, Matthew Hoffman, Register Login International Journal of Designs for Learning, 2018/06/18 [Direct Link]

Predator and Prey

Nicely described in O'Reilly thusly: "a really nice demo of the "what if we didn't publish static text and images, but instead you could interact with the explanation?" You can continue on and look at other examples of Explorables, though note that they get complex quickly. De Casteljau’s Algorithm, for example, is a mind-bender. But the benefit of something like Explorables is that you can see what the equations are describing. And you can see how practical some algorithms are, as in for example this bit of centerline labeling on a map of California. Here's the Observable platform, where you can make stuff like this.

Today: 114 Total: 114 Mike Bostock, Observable, 2018/06/18 [Direct Link]

https://github.com/o1lab/xmysql

I'd rather have a jmysql - a one line JSON api. But still, this is a pretty cool concept. "Generating REST APIs for a MySql database which does not follow conventions of frameworks such as rails, django, laravel etc is a small adventure that one like to avoid .. Hence this." Use with caution, though. Related: AWS SAM CLI -- a CLI tool for local development and testing of serverless applications.

Today: 96 Total: 96 GitHub, 2018/06/18 [Direct Link]

Has Consciousness Lost Its Mind?

This review of the Science of Consciousness conference, held recently in Tucson, illustrates everything that is wrong with academia. The Chronicle of Higher Education seems offended that people outside the orthodoxy of what he styles as the "field of consciousness studies" would gather and discuss the topic in a serious way. I get that he thinks a lot of the content is nonsense. A lot of the content in most conferences is nonsense. But if it's approached earnestly and carefully, it sometimes turns out that this nonsense is valuable. And that's why people have conferences like this, and hatchet jobs by Chronicle reporters do far more harm to scholarship that people thinking hard about the idea of consciousness out there in the desert.

Today: 136 Total: 217 Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/06/21 [Direct Link]

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