Whatever happened to …
Doug Peterson, doug — off the record, 2017/01/09

I noticed this too: numerous incorrect (and indeed, impossible) reports that the shooter in Florida had boarded a flight in Canada. What's significant here is that this fake news (for that's what it was) had nothing to do with social media: it originated, was spread, and was not properly corrected by traditional media. Not social media. If young people are spreading fake news, it's only because they are following the example set by the authorities and role models in society. Sadly, some of those same role models argue that they young should not be given the tools of critical literacy, thereby depriving them of any remedy they might have had. Photo: ABC News

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Build a Custom CMS for a Serverless Static Site Generator
John Polacek, CSS-Tricks, 2017/01/09

This is a pretty technical article so if you aren't inclined just read the first few paragraphs and skim the rest. Or if (like me) you like to get your hands dirty, set this one aside for a Saturday afternoon project. Here's the concept: by using an Amazon cloud account, we can create our own website without using a web server. Amazon provides basic services like storage and authentication; the rest of the word is performed by Javascript you run on your own browser. Why is this significant? Look at the Contentful website and you'll see: it shifts the primary interface to the API, the presentation is content-centric, and the service is scalable on an as-needed basis. It's like everything on the web before this was books, and now we're moving to something that is not books. This is the future; don't miss this.

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3 Areas Where Having “The Innovator’s Mindset” is Crucial
George Couros, 2017/01/09

George Couros discusses three key areas on an innovator's mindset: entrepreneurial spirit, ethical citizen, and empowered learner. The first is a bit of a tautology if you accept the current definition of innovation. But the latter two are important. 'Ethical citizen' involves "humility, fairness and open-mindedness... respect, empathy and compassion; and ... teamwork, collaboration and communication." And the last requires one "who thinks critically and makes discoveries; who uses technology to learn, innovate, communicate, and discover." Of course all of these constitute much more that mere innovation. They are required for citizenship generally.

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The Men Who Started a Thinking Revolution
Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, 2017/01/09

I listened to this podcast in the middle of Thursday night, while sleeping, so my first recollection of it is all mixed up with dreams (example: as a social experiment, Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky swimming together out into the mid-Atlantic to reset standard time as it approaches from Europe). I woke up just enough to realize how good this podcast was, and reading the transcript today reinforces that. The core of their work (at least as interpreted by Freakonomics) is that people make decisions irrationally for a variety of predicable reasons. There is that, but I first encountered Tversky's work in the 1990s, and to me it made the case for the employment of salience in a definition of relevant similarity (it's not that people are irrational, it's that they're rational in different ways than economic theory would predict). See also: Select All, where I describe this influence; Tversky and Gati, Studies of Similarity; Kanhneman, Thinking about Thinking.

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Did Media Literacy Backfire?
dana boyd, Points, 2017/01/09

Danah boyd, despite the provocative title, sticks to a relatively mainstream analysis of recent media failures. She criticizes people's misuse of what might be called the basic elements of media literacy: questioning sources, empowering readers, and doing your own research. She suggests this leaves people unprepared deal with fake news or to even grasp what counts as truth in a chaotic and confused media landscape, and that media literacy (as depicted here) is leading us (or, at least, the U.S.) deeper into tribalism. But a return to the old order of experts and traditional media (which she seems sometimes to support and sometimes not) will not lead us out of the current morass. Nor, probably, is there a technological solution. We need to learn to see the world differently.

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Digital Literacy Challenge: Create an Information Filter Bot
Wesley Fryer, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, 2017/01/09

This would be pretty advanced digital literacy, I would say, but it focuses on some pretty basic skills: using tools to scan content and extract informatun related to your particular interest or need. In this case, Wesley Fryer wants to useTwitter as the data source, aggregating content on universal basic income (UBI) using IFTTT and saving it into Pocket. He would then send the Pocket to a Twitter feed and display it using Flipboard. Not everything went as planned and he bogged down writing a Python application. I probably wouldn't use Flipboard, but if I had to, I'd import the feed to Flipboard using the RSS from Pocket modified by IFFTT to feed into Flipboard's RSS reader. Or just use a specialized application.

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Articulate 360 – Initial Product Review
Godwin Vinny Carole, Swift eLeanring, 2017/01/09

This is a generally favorable review of Articulate 360. The software is now subscription based such that one account provides access to a wide set of services designed to help in the creation, review, storage and playback of e-learning resources. The review does not go much beyond a description of these services. It's not cheap, though, with pricing between $US 700-1000 per year. You can get a much more detailed review from Joe Ganci in learning Solutions. Upside Learning has a short article and video. Learning Tech offers a mixed review.

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