OLDaily

Publish Static Websites, Docker Containers or Node.js Apps Just by Typing: now
Tony Hirst, OUseful.Info, 2018/08/06

I too listened to the Reclaim Today show (here's the audio podcast to listen to while cycling) last week and like Tony Hirst I too spent some time playing with Zeit Now [docs] over the weekend. What I didn't do was write a longish post about it. But Tony Hirst did, so I'd delighted to pass it along. It's not quite as simple as advertised, but it's pretty sweet. I used the Windows version so I didn't have the nice drag-and-drop interface. And I'm still pretty ham-handed with Github so it was easy for me to make basic errors. But yes, if you type 'Now' on the command line in the Windows Terminal, you can have your own website, Node application or Docker container up and running instantly. Here's a simple MDX deck I deployed. Here's the source.

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Whatever Happened to Channel One?
Larry Cuban, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 2018/08/06

Channel One was founded in 1989 as a way to pump marketing content directly into primary school classrooms (disguised as news content created by CNN). It was a going concern in the early 2000s, when I covered it here, but has faded from prominance since then. So what happened to it? "Channel One died at the end of the 2018 school year." No loss. Did it work? It depends on your point of view. Cuban reports, "No evidence I have seen has shown that watching Channel One’s current events led to increased civic engagement of youth. There is limited evidence, however, that youth  favored those products advertised during the two minutes over similar non-advertised products (see here)." Image: Obligation.

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xAPI: A Guide for Technical Implementers
Shelly Blake-Plock, IEEE LTSC TAG xAPI, 2018/08/06

This is a comprehensive guide (41 page PDF) describing the history, content and application of the Experience API (xAPI) specification. "xAPI is an application programming interface which allows software applications to exchange data regarding human activity. Designed for the domain of learning, xAPI enables the capture of data about human performance and its context." The document is authored by many of the people responsible for developing and implementing the specification and will be enormously useful for those developing personalized applications in learning technology. A list of conformant Learning Record Stores (LRS) and xAPI adopters can be found on this ADL page.

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How Does Mastodon Work?
Kev Quirk, 2018/08/06

I've been spending a lot more time on Mastodon recently than I have on Twitter (still not a lot, but it's really nice to have a community of nice people I can talk to, especially on a lazy Sunday afternoon). Anyhow, Mastodon is just different enough from Twitter that it needs a bit of explaining. That's where this article comes in: it's an introductory article explaining what Mastodon is, what it's trying to do, and how to use it. What I like about Mastodon: it's open source, there are no advertisements, there's no 'algorithm' to priorize posts, and it's basically impossible for the trolls to gain a foothold.

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Solid (Social Linked Data)
Wikipedia, 2018/08/06

Solid has made its Wikipedia debut with this new article." Solid (Social Linked Data) is a web decentralization project led by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. The project is run from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The project "aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy" by developing a platform for linked data applications that are completely decentralized and fully under users' control rather than controlled by other entities."

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