OLDaily

Very Slow Movie Player
Bryan Boyer, Medium, 2018/12/28

I don't intend to build one of these (there's just not enough time for everything) but it's a great idea: take a Raspberry Pi computer, attach it to e-paper (like the display a Kindle uses) and then run movies on them at the rate of 32 frames per hour, ie., very slowly. The result is a movie experience that runs for days and monthss instead of a couple of hours. The article first outlines the concept and describes how it would help create a new type of media, and then goes into a detailed description of how it's built (detailed enough that you could probably follow along and build one yourself).

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Designing for least knowledge
Jon Udell, 2018/12/28

Jon Udell takes a bit before getting around to his main point, which is that it makes more sense to design services in such a way that they can't know private user information, so they don't need to assume the liability for getting hacked and leaking this data all over the place. It's a good concept and I support it. (The rest of the article is about how Brave now supports Hypothes.is but it's not such a big deal since we now know that Brave is an Electron application, that is, it uses a built-in Chromium browser engine, just like pretty much every browser out there). Via Aaron Davis.

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Dave Winer on Medium
Dave Winer, Scripting News, 2018/12/28

I've commented off and on recently that blogging remains a vital force on the web. It's true that a lot of blogs have disappeared from Blogger and WordPress, but it's equally true that Medium is becoming the site-of-record for a lot of leading edge developments in technology (for example, if you're studying blockchain online, you'll be reading a lot of Medium articles). I have a Medium blog (but I don't like it; Medium doesn't understand that blog posts and comments are different, and nobody sees it anyways) and I have a Medium membership, so I guess I'm in the ecosystem. Still, I heed Dave Winer's warnings here. "They haven't made any comittment to keeping their archive accessible, nor do they give people the ability to move their content off Medium without breaking links.. they could fail to find a business model, and shut down, leaving a huge hole in the web, over many years." Via Aaron Davis.

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What does it take to be the ‘best and brightest’?
Gillian Light, A macgirl in a pc world, 2018/12/28

"When you see another media report or education ‘expert’ discussing how important it is that we recruit our ‘best and brightest’ to teaching," says Gillian Light, "consider what attributes being the ‘best and brightest’ might entail." It's a good point. She is focusing specifically on whether we should allow "ATAR (Year 12) score of those applying to teacher education courses" to define "best and brightest" (it shouldn't) but I think this is something we should think about more broadly. I'm not happy with simple referents as "best" and "brightest" at all, because they presuppose there are people would designate as such. But of course, the "best of us" is often "the least of us", and often has a lot more to do with attitude and effort than test scores.

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Google Builds a Digital Reproduction of the National Museum of Brazil After its Tragic Destruction
Colossal, 2018/12/28

A digital reproduction is, of course, no replacement for the original. But when you have lost the original, the digital replacement is a whole lot better than nothing. So when considering the cost of digitizing collections, I think the bean-counters should take into account the value of having something rather than nothing after a disaster.

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Rhizomatic Learning – a somewhat curious introduction
Dave Cormier, Dave’s Educational Blog, 2018/12/28

This is an introduction from Dave Cormier on Rhizomatic Learning. It's mostly a history of the development of the concept from his perspective. "My job as a teacher," he writes, "is to create smooth space. To create an uncertain space where students have a chance to be ready to create their own map. To build an ecology within which students can grow, wander, break off and reconnect."

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