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25 Years of Ed Tech
Martin Weller, AU Press, 2020/02/28

Martin Weller has written this book - a freely accessible eBook (224 page PDF) that looks at the last 25 years of educational technology. I've read through a few chapters (it may take you a couple of hours to finish it) and it's relatively light and accessible. Obviously my experience and his over that span of time both overlaps and also has its differences of emphasis. Still, I was a bit surprised to see how little attention was devoted to RSS, how major technologies like Usenet and listserv are not mentioned, and how major players like UMUC and ADL aren't mentioned (though at least SCORM was mentioned, though EML is not, nor is XML). Some of the dates also seem off; blogging, for example, begins in 1998, not 2003 (Blogger itself was launched in 1999). So you should read this book as one person's perspectivce, rather than as anything like a comprehensive overview of the field.

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Are fastpages Really an EASY Way to Publish a Blog From Jupyter Notebooks?
Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, 2020/02/28

The answer is, of course, "No it is not," though having said that, it's easier than most such applications (butr the bar is so low this isn't really saying much). My experience having run though dozens and dozens of this sort of thing is that the authors typically assume that their readers have exactly the same backgroiund and experience that they do. Which, of course, I never do, and neither do most readers. As Tony Hirst says, if you already have a background in GitHub pages and Jekyll, this saves you a few steps. But if you don't have that background, then it's not easy. Anyhow, it still seemed to be worth exploring, and my guide now has two parts: part one, part two.

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