OLDaily

The Old Internet Died And We Watched And Did Nothing
Katie Notopoulos, BuzzFeed.News, 2020/01/02

In 1998 I was posting on discussion boards (like the old HotWired Threads) and on mailing lists (like WWW-Dev) and seen some of these early forums come and go. So I decided that I should copy and preserve these posts on my own website, just in case the boards and lists disappeared. Which, in fact, they did. And that's how today I ended up with a huge archive of more than 1600 articles on my web site. But most people, as the author of this article suggests, "did nothing", and so we are now in the situation where a lot of the web's original content has been lost. Indeed, this article is a relatively recent listing of sites that wen't down - MySpace, Froendster, Xanga and Webshots. There's so much more - the venerated (and verifiably ugly) GeoCities, for example, Blip.tv and Google Videos (which between them lost about half my videos), and of course almost all of the aforementioned discussion board and mailing list contents. What can you do? Do what I did - make sure there's a back-up copy of your own web content. Via Aaron Davis.

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Ten weird tricks for resisting surveillance capitalism in and through the classroom . . . next term!
Erin Glass, HASTAC, 2020/01/02

These are tricks for resisting surveillance in general, and not merely surveillance capitalism (though  probably most surveillance is ethically questionable). The article is written in that snappy sort of meme-aware jargon the well-informed like to use (with the weird tricks meme in the headline leading the way). But some of the information is good (and some of it is loopy). Maybe skip suggestions number 1 and  (which involves using "that wry teacherly snark you have" to "inform students on" various conspiracy theories). But exploring community-driven tools (like Commons in a Box) is a good idea. So is having students read terms of service. Definitely explore downloading your personal data (but maybe don't delete it until you have a back-up). There are some bad book recommendations and good blog recommendations.

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What Is Curriculum Development
Dinant Roode, trenducation, 2020/01/02

This post is from Ocvtober but I only found this feed today and I felt it would be useful to add a wider perspective to the instructional slash experience design discussion. The post itself is fairly introductory, explaining what curriculum development is, describing why it's important for teachers, and identifying three types of curriculum design: subject-centered, learner-centered, and problem-centered. I would imagine there are more (for example, performance-support-centered or task-centered) but this list is enought to get the typology off the ground.

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LEAP Innovations 2020 Framework
Emily Liebtag, Getting Smart, 2020/01/02

It's only January 2nd but I'm already sick of 'this-and-that 2020' themes. This one is a bit of marketing (I would guess) for LEAP Innovations. It reminds me that there's a whole world out there that I don't understand - for example, they write that they "they honored and used several key design principles." What is it to 'honor' a design principle? Or "they are able to witness more practitioners implementing their ideas." Again, it's odd word usage - which tells me that they are appealing to a specific demographic that talks like that. Anyhow, I wanted to link to this, so people can see what's happening in this space. Because some of the core ideas are good - learner led, learner demonstrated, learner connected - though I don't believe that's what we would actually see.

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The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade
Audrey Watters, Hack Education, 2020/01/02

I've been seeing a lot of praise for Audrey Watters's post The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade (these Tweets captured by Aaron Davis are typical). If you haven't seen it, take this as a reminder to put it on your weekend reading list (it will take a bit to get through, because Watters does a lot more than just write a listicle here).

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The future of high-speed computing may be larger CPUs with optics
Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 2020/01/02

This is pretty far down the ed tech stack, but I want to take note because I've been seeing an increase in the number of events in this area lately. The area in question could be described under the general heading of 'optical computing'. The idea is to use light-based components, rather than electricity-based components. There are numerous issues that have been solved, and many more to go, but the potential is for faster and more energy-efficient computers. This article is from last April - what prompted me to cover optical computing today was an ed tech review of an 'optica' computer (which as it turned out has nothing to do with optical computing). You might also follow up what my colleagues at NRC and Femtolab are doing in this field.

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